Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

- You know, I'm sick and tired of boring salads.

So we decided to jazz up salads today on Milk Street.

I went to Vietnam years ago, and I loved those flavors-- you know, lime juice, a little fish sauce-- really bright, clean flavors, so we applied those flavors in a Vietnamese-style chicken salad.

Then in Greece, of course, we love a typical white bean salad, but we found a way of getting flavors into the beans.

And finally, we did Caesar salad, Manchego cheese.

So stay tuned with us here at Milk Street as we take a fresh look at exciting new salads.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - So what is there to say about chicken salad that's never been said before?

You can add mayonnaise, celery, you can have grapes, you can put apples in it.

Nothing wrong with those.

But I was in Vietnam, I don't know, 15 years ago, and I noticed that the flavors were really simple but really clean.

We thought we'd take the notion of chicken salad and add a classic sauce, if you like, or combination of ingredients to make it really clean and bright.

So this is the formula.

Now, Julia Child always used to tell me she'd have these little formulas in her head, like, how to make a custard, et cetera.

This is one of the standard recipes, "sauces" you'll see all over the Far East.

Which is two parts lime juice, roughly one part fish sauce.

Fish sauce, if you buy the lousy stuff in the supermarket, is lousy; it tastes like fish.

The good stuff does not.

It just has a lot of depth of flavor, so don't be scared of it.

They always add a little sugar to this.

And we're gonna add a little garlic, grated garlic as well.

So onion is next.

We're not gonna dice it.

This is a salad-- it's obviously not being cooked.

So we want the texture.

So we have the sauce, we're just gonna let the onion sit in the sauce for a few minutes.

Just takes away some of that bite.

Gives it a little bit extra flavor as well.

And that will be our dressing.

We'll set that aside.

A few other ingredients, cabbage, we're gonna shred it.

A couple of chilies.

I tend to, as you might expect; 'cause I don't like a ton of heat, I'm gonna actually seed this.

You can leave the seeds in if you, if you like pain.

Just slice these across.

What else do we have?

Well, we have a little basil.

We're gonna just tear this into big pieces.

A lot of basil I find at supermarket... (sniffs) ...doesn't have a lot of flavor.

And when you can actually smell it.

Put it in your hands like that, you should actually have a fairly strong smell.

So we have all of our ingredients.

The last is chopped peanuts.

We'll put about half of them in the salad, half for this topping; so we have shredded carrots, about three cups of shredded chicken, cabbage, the peppers, the chilies.

And another tip I have, which we're not following right now, is I like to use humongous bowls.

I find anytime I toss a salad or something, I just use a giant bowl.

It's just a little easier, I think.

This is fine.

But if you have a bigger bowl, it's always good to have one really humongous bowl around.

So that was basil, cilantro.

I'm gonna put about half the chopped peanuts in this, and then we have our dressing.

So I'm gonna get a bigger bowl because this is gonna be hard to do, so.

The bowl for set decoration is now gonna be used for a salad.

That's so much better.

There you go.

When people tell me that what they're about to serve me is healthy, it always makes me nervous, because that makes me think it's not gonna taste good.

(chuckling): But this is a case where I can say, hey, it's healthy, you know, but it actually tastes great.

So it's got the best of both worlds.

And we reserved some of those chopped peanuts for the top.

So we have texture, right, with the cabbage, and we have the nuts on top, et cetera.

Bright, fresh, nice color, a little bit of hints of flavor from Vietnam.

And taking a classic and turning to something that we really love here at Milk Street.

Mm.

I'm not going to tell you it's healthy.

It's just delicious, and that's good enough for me.

So if you want to trade up chicken salad, you want something with more flavor and more texture, try this Vietnamese-style, or influenced, salad; very bright flavors, great textures, great color, and it's absolutely one of our favorite salad recipes here at Milk Street.

- Mostly, salads serve the function of being a palate cleanser, right?

They're that refreshing bite between rich things on the table, and that's thanks to the acidity in their dressing.

At Milk Street, the function of that acidity or tartness-- sourness-- is so important to our cooking, that we reach far beyond the world of vinegars.

We do love vinegars, but we have developed four categories to think about sourness.

So these are four ways to be sour.

So our first category, our first way to be sour, are everyday vinegars.

These need to be versatile.

So they need to be used for salad dressings, to deglaze a pan, a little pop in a rice dish.

They should be held at arm's length 'cause you're gonna use them all the time So our second category are aged and concentrated.

But they're not all vinegars.

Think of them as salad dressing in a bottle.

They're so reduced in flavor, that the acidity's balanced with some caramelization.

And you're gonna use them as a drizzle, as a glaze, and definitely on dessert.

Our third way to be sour are your specialty vinegars.

these can be a little; further away than your everyday in your reduced and concentrated.

This is like having a house wine.

You bring it out when guests are coming over and they know they're eating at your house.

You want at least one specialty vinegar at home.

I'm gonna show you how to use it to make a really simple vinaigrette that Matt's actually gonna use later in the episode.

All right, so here we have lettuces, but also bitter things.

We have endive and radicchio.

And keep that in mind, 'cause it's gonna affect how I build my vinaigrette.

I'm gonna use the calamansi.

I'm choosing that because we have these bitter greens.

And this has a sweetness to it.

And I know that I wanna balance how bitter the greens are.

So I'm gonna use a little more of the vinegar than the classic three-to-one proportion.

And a little salt.

And I think black pepper as a spice is great with this.

You could also use a little cumin or coriander if you want.

How acidic a dressing needs to be really depends on what you're serving it with.

So if this salad was going with really rich main dishes, I would skip the oil altogether.

My friend Viola Bottoni, when she's serving something rich, she just takes the greens, sprinkles them with salt, squeezes fresh lemon juice or drizzles of vinegar, and tosses it with her hands, and that's the palate cleanser.

I tend to just spoon it on top and then dress it right when it gets to the table so nothing gets too soggy.

So we have our fourth category, which really represents Milk Street's love of and dependency on sourness and tartness to brighten things up.

And this is the "not vinegar" category.

So you have citrus, of course, yogurt and sour cream verjus, which is a mildly acidic grape product.

It's great for making a pan sauce, especially for people who don't drink alcohol.

Then you also have tamarind and tamarind paste.

And then my favorite of all the not vinegars, dried sour spices-- so this is sumac.

These are dried black limes, sometimes known as omani lime, and they're fermented and dried salt-cured limes.

These are incredible flavor booster.

So why do I love the dried spices so much?

Purely a texture thing.

Let me demonstrate.

You have a perfectly roasted chicken with crispy, golden skin.

So many of us take a piece of lemon and squeeze it all over the top.

What does that do?

Soggy, soggy, soggy polka dots where the liquid from the lemon juice destroys your beautiful, crispy chicken skin.

So instead, if you take your sumac, sprinkle this on top.

When we bite into it, we'll get the benefit of the brightening from the sourness, but we won't get any of the sogginess.

It's perfect.

Let's review our four categories.

We have our everyday vinegars, reduced and concentrated, specialty vinegars, and our not vinegars.

I've showed you how to use three of the categories, but not the everyday vinegars; in the next segment, I'm gonna make a Greek bean salad, and it's gonna use red wine vinegar.

We're actually using two sources of tartness in this recipe.

We're using red wine vinegar, but we're also gonna be using lemon juice at the end.

Let's start with the main body of our salad, which is four cans of white beans that are drained and rinsed, and we're gonna add half a teaspoon of salt.

We're gonna stir them up-- and now the key to getting a really flavorful bean salad, even when you're gonna serve at room temperature, is to heat them.

We're gonna put them in the microwave for three to three and a half minutes.

When they're in the microwave, they're gonna swell.

When we take them out of the microwave and we add some flavoring agents as the beans contract, as they cool down, they're actually gonna absorb and then get coated in that flavor.

We'll have flavored beans, not flavor on beans.

(beeps) You'll notice none of my other ingredients are prepped.

'Cause this is how I actually cook at home.

I read the recipe.

I have three and a half minutes.

That's a perfect amount of time to get my ingredients cut up.

We're gonna start with a red onion.

And you want them so thin that sometimes when you whiff and you actually miss the onion, that's better than getting thick pieces because we're not cooking this onion.

The vinegar alone is gonna sort of cook or pickle the onion.

We also wanna grate some garlic.

So both of these things are being used raw.

And we've burst tons of cells cutting them up and grating them up so they have a lot of flavor.

But you know what?

I'm looking at my microwave, and I need to stir my beans.

(beeps) So another reason to read your recipe before you start cooking is that often when I have red onion, I'll pickle it on the side while I heat my beans.

But I know that this is only gonna sit for at least 30 minutes in a high acid vinegar, and that's going to mellow them out and sort of pickle them in the salad.

It saves a step of work.

So take the time to read your recipe before you start cooking.

You may save time in the long run.

And now our beans are almost done, so I can grab those.

Give it the good old kitchen shoulder shrug.

Okay, and while they're nice and hot from the microwave, you wanna get all of your flavorings in right away.

So in goes the garlic, about half your onion.

And then we're gonna add in our red wine vinegar.

We're gonna add in a little bit of olive oil and salt and pepper.

In Greece, you often use a pretty potent red wine vinegar, one with a high acidity.

That's because it's cutting through other rich flavors.

So here we have a lot of starchiness, and we wanna soften our onions; acid's great for that.

Okay, we wanna let this sit for at least 30 minutes.

The longer it sits, the mellower the onions will become.

All the flavors will meld together.

So I like to make this dish at least a day in advance.

I take it out of the fridge, though, and let it come to room temperature before I finish it.

For a Milk Street recipe, this needs to now have some punch, needs a little fat, needs some acid, it needs some herbs.

We've got all of that covered.

Let's start with our avocado.

So we didn't prep these earlier because the avocado will brown.

I score the outside of the skin, and then it's really easy just to peel back the avocado skin.

And then from there.

This is like butter.

This is gorgeous.

That's gonna add the fatty element that any big dinner salad needs, right?

There are components to a salad that actually feels like a meal.

So if you want this to be lasting, don't skimp on fat.

We also want herbs for brightness and freshness, and we can use the parsley as-is.

If there are really big leaves of parsley, you know, you might tear this one in half.

But it's really great to use herbs as leafy greens.

They pack a big punch of flavor.

The dill I like to cut, because this is not friendly to your dinner guests, you know it's gonna hang from a tooth and make for awkward conversation.

Chopping the dill means that it's gonna be evenly distributed all over the salad.

We're gonna release more dill flavor.

So this can go in too.

Now is when it comes to layering acid.

So we have a lemon, we don't need that much more liquid, but we want a lot of lemon flavor.

So we wanna zest a good portion of the lemon.

And that just packs the essential oils, which carry all that bright lemon flavor.

A lot of the work we're actually asking lemon juice to do is from the lemon flavor and not the acidity.

But since this has sat for a while, the vinegar's mellowed out.

More red wine vinegar here would be a little harsh, but even just a teaspoon of lemon juice has a brightness and a freshness without any of the harshness of a high acid vinegar.

Every dish, especially one with this much starch, wants a final bright pop, and one way we're getting that is from adding the lemon zest and the lemon juice.

Little techniques for layering acid that really make the salad better.

We're almost done.

One last touch-- a little drizzle of olive oil.

And now we have this completed Greek white bean salad.

Now with a piece of bread and a hunk of feta cheese, this is a salad that can stand alone.

- So I don't know about you, but dinner salad to me tends to be whatever I can find in the crisper drawer.

There's little premeditation to what ends up in the salad bowl.

So my casualness with salad doesn't mean I don't care very much about it.

I pay a lot of attention to how I prepare what goes in the salad, how to bring out its best flavor, and how to make it look best and taste best.

So let's go ahead and work through a few different really common vegetables and make a really nice salad here.

So I love romaine.

It's perhaps the lettuce I have most in my crisper drawer at home because it tends to hold well, it'll last for a week or so.

So with romaine, I tend to just cross cut it.

So I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna take that Romaine heart.

And I can just hold that heart and just cut crosswise.

We're not going too thin, so I go to about half-inch thick.

We're just gonna go all the way up that romaine heart in nice even pieces.

We're gonna discard those very top ends of that romaine heart 'cause they tend to be pretty bruised and they tend to be really mature at the tip.

So they can be a little bitter.

One thing I always do when I cross cut romaine hearts is I'm gonna give it a little fluff and make sure there aren't any brown bits, and then I'm gonna place it in my salad bowl.

Now, when I'm building a salad, I do make sure to keep everything in little piles until I'm done.

This is gonna look like a Trivial Pursuit piece by the end of this.

Now, I want a slightly sweeter grain in there, too.

So let's go with a little butter lettuce.

Now, butter lettuce is very, very delicate.

If you cut butter lettuce, those leaves are gonna get mashed, and it's a very organic shape.

It's just not gonna look right if I cut it.

So I'm gonna use my fingers for this.

So I'm gonna tear off a few leaves, and I'm gonna tear off the bottoms, and I'm just gonna tear those into pieces.

Just sort of very organic.

So just a little bit.

Not too much butter lettuce.

So radicchio, it's shaped like a cabbage.

The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut it in half.

And we have a core.

You really don't want to eat a radicchio core because it can be very bitter.

I'm going to put it cut side down.

It's not going to slide around.

And I'm going to cut that half into a quarter.

Hold my knife at an angle and just cut out that core.

I'm going to cut that just in half again and just cut crosswise; if we leave it in big pieces, it's going to be too bitter.

It's going to overwhelm that salad.

We want little pops and accent of that flavor to tie our salad together.

So I will put that in my bowl there.

Now, with these beautiful radishes, what I'm going to do here, I'm going to leave a little bit of that top on.

And this provides a handle for cutting.

Let's keep those fingers safe, so I'll cut off that root end, cut in half through that stem end, and then we can just cut very clean slices.

I really think of salads as a great way to practice my knife skills, and I find all the knife work for a salad meditative and one of my favorite parts of making dinner.

One of my other absolute favorite go-to's for salads is fennel.

Now fennel has that licoricey anise-y flavor.

It's got a really crisp, crunchy texture.

There's a lot of stock left on this fennel bulb.

So let's go ahead.

We're going to cut those off.

Now the feathery green bits, you can go ahead and even just add these to your salad as long as they're clean and fresh looking.

So we've taken the stalks off and now we're left with that fennel bulb.

We're going to put it down on that flat bottom, then we're going to carefully cut it in half.

Now we have these two halves.

So the first thing I'm going to do is peel off that tough exterior layer.

And what we want to do is we want to cut them crosswise to the root end.

When you cut crosswise, you're cutting across the fibers of the fennel so it will turn out more tender.

Adding salt will help soften the texture and draw out the moisture a little bit.

So I'm gonna add a pinch of salt and just give it a little fluff.

So the one thing we don't have yet is cucumber.

One thing I always do with cucumber is peel and seed it.

I'm gonna pinch it so it doesn't slide around and I'm gonna cut it in half lengthwise.

The seeds and the goo in a cucumber do absolutely nothing for a salad.

And all you wanna do is scoop out that channel.

I like using a really thin, sharp edge spoon for this.

Now we have this gorgeous cucumber flesh which we can cut in a variety of different ways.

More often than not, I'm just going to cut it on a bit of a bias and I'm just turning that cucumber a little bit and I'm just going to cut crosswise.

In addition to exposing more surface area, so they absorb more flavor and release more flavor, bias cuts are just really pretty.

All we need now is a dressing.

So this is the calamansi vinegar Rosie talked about earlier, which is just an absolute favorite.

Pour it over our greens.

I'm gonna start mixing everything up.

I'm lifting from the bottom and sort of fluffing it all together.

So I'm being very gentle when I'm plating that salad.

I'm just carefully, carefully placing that salad on the plate.

Give it some nice height.

So there we have this gorgeous salad with all the different shapes, all these different flavors: succulent, chewy, tender.

And we've cut every vegetable to really maintain its flavor and bring out its best texture.

So next time you're emptying out your crisper drawer to make salad for dinner, really consider how you're prepping it.

- When you think of memorable salads in the group of classics, the Caesar ranks pretty high up there with its crispy romaine, crunchy croutons, creamy garlic dressing and a shower of Parmesan.

But if you took those elements and made a sharp turn into Spanish territory, you end up with something out of this world fantastic.

Our romaine salad with Manchego and smoky pepper dressing keeps the best elements of crisp romaine, crunchy croutons and makes an incredibly rich, garlicky dressing based on a Catalonian romesco sauce with this base of smoked red peppers.

So we'll start with the croutons.

We have a quarter cup of olive oil in a 12-inch skillet.

So the choice of bread for these is a basic French baguette-style loaf.

We've taken a portion of the baguette and cut 12 slices about a quarter-inch thick each.

These will simmer in the olive oil for about three minutes.

You want to turn them over halfway through, and both sides will get a deep, golden, toasty brown.

Okay, so we'll just transfer them to paper towels.

And while these are hot, you want to sprinkle them with a little bit of salt.

Little pepper's always nice.

All right, we'll let those cool down until they get completely crisp, and then we'll start making our dressing.

Okay, the croutons are cool enough to handle, and now we're going to break them up into smaller pieces.

About a quarter-cup's worth we're going to use in the dressing.

So the last two slices I'll break up right into the food processor.

Then we'll add our roasted red pepper.

And of course, this is a garlicky dressing, so we're gonna add a big fat clove of crushed garlic.

Then we have sherry vinegar, which is the Spanish vinegar of choice.

Then to this version of romesco, we add a little bit of smoked paprika, which is a Spanish-style paprika, and something very special we're adding to this salad is smoked almonds.

And of course, every good sauce or vinaigrette needs a little bit of olive oil.

And we have a quarter cup of that here.

Gonna pulse this a few times until it's sort of mixed up together, and then we're gonna let it go until it gets really smooth.

Okay, this is looking pretty good.

Okay, so now we're going to taste for seasoning.

Add salt and pepper if we need it.

Mm, this is so good.

So let's talk about why the crust is important for emulsification.

It's the crust on a loaf of bread that gets brown in the oven, and that browning is caramelization.

And that browning also turns the starches into sugars called dextrins.

And it's those dextrins that are fantastic for emulsification.

So if you're using bread, it's a thickener for anything with a liquid base, leave the crust on.

Okay, so the next thing is to test the texture of this dressing.

That is pretty thick.

That is not gonna do well on a lettuce leaf.

That's gonna be pretty thick and gloppy.

So we're gonna add a little bit of water to this.

Couple tablespoons, maybe three at the most.

All right.

That is looking really nice.

Got something that's a little bit thinner-- can you see that?

It's dripping off a little bit, but it's thick enough to still cling to the spoon.

That's a nice thickness there.

Okay, best part of this salad: the assembly.

(laughs) We're using hearts of romaine.

We'll just cut them into half-inch wide strips right across the top.

Okay.

Oh, this is gorgeous, crispy romaine.

We're going to add a little bit of torn fresh mint.

This just adds a bright herbal element.

Okay, we'll take about half of this, which is about a half cup, and we'll toss it in, and then we'll see if we need to add a little bit more.

But I think this is gonna be a nice amount.

Instead of a shower of Parmesan, we have a sharp, salty Manchego cheese, which is a Spanish cheese, of course, finely grated; we'll just sprinkle some of this over the top.

We'll sprinkle over some more of the chopped smoked almonds.

And of course, can't forget those fantastic croutons we made.

My favorite part.

It's a gorgeous salad.

I mean, the color of the romesco dressing is just fabulous.

And a final grating of Manchego cheese.

Mm.

It's all the best elements of a classic Caesar, with flavor seriously ramped up.

It's really a versatile, incredibly flavorful, unforgettable salad.

And lucky you, you can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season of Milk Street at MilkStreetTV.com.

- Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes, and step-by-step videos.

Access our content any time to change the way you cook.

- The new Milk Street Cookbook is now available and includes every recipe from our TV show.

From Vietnamese chicken salad and tiramisu to easy-stretch pizza dough and Austrian apple strudel, the new Milk Street Cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.

Order your copy of the Milk Street Cookbook for $29.95; 40% less than the cover price.

Call 855-MILK-177 or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.