How to make a great chopped salad
Long before we stood on line to watch our salad bits tossed by assembly-line hands and stuffed into biodegradable bowls, we ordered chopped salads in restaurants.
Chefs in those kitchens took care to balance crunch with creamy, tangy and savoury. The reds of radishes and tomatoes, the burnish of crisped bacon and bright greens of beans and hardy lettuces showed through milky dressings that coated each piece. Precise knifework guaranteed a democratically diverse representation of vegetables in every forkful, bestowing an ironically elevated status on the whole genre.
The nation’s Salad Coast, a.k.a. West, laid claim to the chopped salad’s invention more than a half-century ago, and since then the variations and tweaks have moved the goal-line from what a good chopped salad ought to be to anythinggoes, kitchen-sink mode. Unless, of course, a particular establishment has produced such an instant classic that its patrons threaten to defect if that salad changes or is retired.
“Chopped salad was the go-to dish in the restaurant you grew up with — the one that brings you back to another era,” says chef Michael Schlow, head of a restaurant group that delivers a satisfying rendition at the Riggsby in Washington’s Carlyle Hotel. “It was really one of the first that made it onto this menu: crisp and clean, a little decadent. It will never come off.”
What makes a good chopped salad? It need not have specific ingredients, the way, say, a Cobb salad ought to include blue cheese and hard-cooked egg, tomato and avocado.
Texture is key; no solid components should be significantly larger than others. The raw and the cooked are often side by side.
The dressing does need to bring it all together with harmonic sweetness and acidity. Schlow says his Riggsby kitchen constantly tinkers with the Thousand Island dressing it makes. Sriracha sets it apart in an unexpected yet winning way.
The chopped salad made famous at Freds, the restaurant located in Barneys department stores, skews a little sweet with ripe pear and a creamy balsamic dressing. It is topped with “pulled chicken” and costs $30 at its downtown New York location. But the recipe is included in a new “Freds” cookbook, and we can report that you can, indeed, make it at home for less.
A chopped salad can go Tex-Mex, as proved by Melissa Coleman in the “The Minimalist Kitchen” (Oxmoor House, 2018): chipotle, black beans and garlic, of course. Sweet potato tortilla chips add extra flavour.