Damuck takes her love of salads to new heights
The L.a.-based food stylist on lessons from Martha Stewart, salads-as-art-form and feeding an obsession with her first book, Salad Freak
For Jess Damuck, it’s always been salads. Whenever she meets people and they find out she’s a chef and food stylist, their first question is usually, “What’s your favourite thing to make?” Whatever the season or occasion, her reply is the same: salads.
“Everyone’s so disappointed by that answer,” she says, laughing.
The title of Damuck’s first book acts like a beacon for fellow salad obsessives. As fittingly confessional as Salad Freak is, though, the title started as a joke.
“It was a back-and-forth thing in my head. I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m ready to be the salad freak,'” she adds.
Damuck has worked with Martha Stewart for more than a decade as a food editor and stylist, producer (including on the Emmy-nominated series Martha and Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party) and “personal salad maker.”
After reflecting on her inspiration for the book — and her time working with Stewart, who wrote the foreword — Damuck eventually came around to the idea that she had been a salad freak all along.
“The thing is everyone who works (at Martha Stewart) is a little bit obsessive. Whether they’re clean freaks or salad freaks, or whatever it is,” she says.
“It’s this very obsessive sort of perfectionist personality type. And I think everybody there was able to lean into it and that’s how everything was so beautiful, creative and amazing. So, I think I just had to own it.”
Damuck’s love of salads only became more heightened following her move from New York City to Los Angeles in October 2020. Working with seasonal California produce as she finished her book proposal fuelled her creativity.
“Especially since moving to Los Angeles, it is an obsession,” says Damuck. “The produce out here is just crazy.”
Colourful and fresh, Damuck’s salads are the main event — not a side-dish afterthought. She expresses a joyful reverence in more than 100 recipes arranged by the four seasons, each one showcasing produce in its prime.
Spring and summer’s abundance of tender greens, snappy peas and juicy melons may naturally lend themselves to salads, but Damuck’s fall and winter chapters are just as inviting. Using seasonal ingredients such as white grapefruit and pink chicory, “I was amazed by how winter ended up being one of the brightest and most inspiring chapters,” she says.
Growing up on Shelter Island, New York — a small community between Long Island’s North and South Forks — Damuck didn’t have a lot of exposure to restaurants (a Chinese or Italian meal required a trip off-island). But when bay scallops were in season, her family would get them directly from their neighbour, who was a commercial fisher. They had a little garden in the backyard and access to many outstanding farms on the nearby North Fork.
“This awareness of how important local food is has always been something that’s been around me,” says Damuck.
She threw dinner parties when her mother was at work as an emergency room nurse and slowly took over preparing holiday meals, poring over Martha Stewart magazines for inspiration. When she read Stewart’s foreword for the first time, she was speechless, Damuck recalls. “I never dreamed that, someday, Martha would be writing the foreword for my first cookbook.”
Damuck started working with Stewart at Everyday Food magazine, interning by day and attending classes at the French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center) by night. She recalls one of her toughest teachers, Chef X, offering advice on which internship she should take after the program: a pastry chef position at an acclaimed New York restaurant or continuing with Stewart.
“He said to me, ‘There are thousands of restaurants, yes?’ And I was like, ‘Yes.’ And he’s like, ‘There is one Martha Stewart, yes?’ And I was like, ‘Yes.’ And he was like, ‘There’s your answer. There will always be restaurants, but you have to do this.’ And it was the best advice I’ve ever gotten,” says Damuck, laughing.
“Every single time I work with Martha, I learn something from her. There is no greater wealth of knowledge I’ve ever come upon than Martha Stewart. She is so curious. She knows a little bit of everything — if not a lot a bit of everything — and I’ve always just tried to soak up as much as I could.”
Besides a career in food, Damuck is a visual artist who paints and sculpts. Inspired by shapes, colours, flavours and textures, she sees making salads as another creative outlet. Drawing on a “filing cabinet of flavours in (her) brain” she sometimes sees combinations before she tastes them.
As a food stylist, she considers the visual composition of a dish as much as she does the culinary. To help readers make their salads look like the ones on the page, she shares food styling tips throughout the book. For Snoop Dogg’s BBQ chicken Cobb salad, for example, Damuck suggests clustering the halved tomatoes and sliced cucumbers as well as scattering a few throughout “for visual appeal to break things up a bit.”
Even a simple combination of textures and flavours takes care, she says. With salads, “there are no shortcuts. It’s not like you’re using these big flavour bombs, or tonnes of fat, salt or sugar. It’s a much different way of cooking, and I always have really loved it.”
The most important question to ask when shopping for salads is, according to Damuck: is it in season? She encourages readers to shop at farmers’ markets, consider joining a local CSA (community supported agriculture) farm share program or grow their own vegetables. When buying produce at the grocery store, consider seasonality.
Making the kind of light and fresh food she loves is about enhancing ingredients, but ultimately letting them speak for themselves. (Something she calls “taking the raw off.”)
“Salad is such a careful balancing act between these delicate flavours. And it’s what I get really excited about when you’re buying peak, in-season produce — you really don’t have to do much to make it taste incredible,” says Damuck.
“And to me, they’re not flavours you want to cover up. You just want to enhance them with a little bit of oil and salt and a little bit of acid. And these combinations in texture that can really make them even more exciting.”
SNOOP’S BBQ CHICKEN COBB SALAD WITH ALL THE GOOD STUFF PRODUCE:
3 heads Little Gem lettuce
1 pint (280 g) cherry tomatoes
1 avocado
2 Persian cucumbers Fresh chives
Meat:
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 8 oz/225 g each)
1/2 lb (225 g) bacon, cooked Snoop-style (recipe follows) Dairy:
2 to 4 large eggs
2 oz (55 g) blue cheese 1 recipe Garlicky Buttermilk Ranch Dressing (recipe follows)
Pantry:
2 tsp Lawry’s Seasoning Salt
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper Freshly ground black pepper
1 cup (240 ml) Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce Neutral oil, for frying
4 small corn tortillas (blue if you can find them; storebought strips are also fine!)
Kosher salt
MAKE THE RUB:
In a small bowl, mix together two teaspoons Lawry’s, 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder, 1/2 teaspoon chili powder, 1/4 teaspoon cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper.
Coat the chicken breasts with the rub and let them sit for 15 minutes or, refrigerated, up to overnight.
COOK:
Preheat the oven to 400°F (205°C). Get a medium pot of water boiling. Prepare an ice bath.
Place the coated chicken breasts on a parchment-lined rimmed baking sheet, and with a silicone brush, coat the chicken with barbecue sauce. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the chicken reaches 165°F (74°C) on an instantread thermometer.
Meanwhile, add two to four eggs to the boiling water. Cook for 10 minutes. Transfer to the ice bath. Wipe out and dry the saucepan completely; you’ll use it to fry your tortilla strips.
Add 1/2 inch (12 mm) oil to the saucepan. Cut four tortillas into thin (1/2-inch/12 mm or less) strips. Once the oil has reached about 350°F (175°C), or it bubbles up when you drop a strip in it, fry the tortilla strips. Fry the strips until golden brown, about one minute, and transfer to a paper towel–lined plate. Season with salt.
PREP:
Separate the leaves of three heads lettuce and tear them into bite-size pieces; wash and spin dry. Cut one pint (280 g) cherry tomatoes in half. Halve, pit and peel one avocado and cut into eighths. Thinly slice two Persian cucumbers and slice some chives.
ASSEMBLE AND SERVE:
Arrange the lettuce on a serving platter. Arrange the tomatoes, cucumbers and avocado on the serving platter. Peel the eggs, cut them into quarters and arrange on the plate. Crumble 1/2 pound Snoop-style bacon and sprinkle evenly over the salad. Crumble two ounces (55 g) blue cheese and sprinkle it evenly over everything.
Slice the chicken on a diagonal and transfer to the top of the salad. Drizzle with the dressing and sprinkle with the chives, tortilla strips, and black pepper.
Serves: 4 as a meal
STYLING TIP:
Cluster the halved tomatoes and cucumbers in one area of the plate but scatter a few for visual appeal to break things up a bit.
BACON, SNOOP-STYLE
1 lb (455 g) of your favourite bacon (something not too thick-cut works best)
Heat a cast-iron or other large skillet over medium heat, and dump the bacon in. Stir it around occasionally until curly and very crispy, 15 to 20 minutes. Transfer to a paper towel–lined plate.
GARLICKY BUTTERMILK RANCH DRESSING
1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp (90 ml) mayonnaise
1/4 cup (60 ml) buttermilk 1 tbsp plus 1 tsp (20 ml) distilled white vinegar Pinch garlic powder Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Put all of the ingredients in a small bowl and whisk to combine. The dressing keeps for about one week in the fridge.
Makes: 1/2 cup (120 ml)