With spring comes salads; check out these new recipes from several high-profile chefs.
3 NEW SALADS FROM NANCY SILVERTON, BRYANT TERRY AND MORE
When you think of spring, a few common images come to mind. Blue skies. Wildflowers. Flonase bottles. But, if you’re like us — thoroughly bored of beets and broccoli — you dream of massive salads brimming with asparagus, snap peas, watercress and fava beans. Check your farmers market. The greens are here. And it’s about time, because California has felt springlike since February. Right now, we’re craving a really epic salad with all the extras: Homemade croutons, herb-flecked vinaigrettes, maybe a trace of meat? To find it, we consulted a few high-profile experts with new cookbooks, including Los Angeles restaurateur Nancy Silverton, of Netflix’s “Chef’s Table” fame, and Oakland’s Bryant Terry, a James Beard award-winning chef and food justice activist.
For Terry, chef-in-residence at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, a great salad starts with the season’s sprightly stalks, whether he’s grilling them outside or swiping them across a mandoline for a luxurious and surprisingly easy salad.
“It’s such a special moment in the year when asparagus arrives,” Terry says. “You just can’t beat the flavor in April and May. I don’t think there’s a single other vegetable I get as excited about.”
That easy dish — shaved asparagus salad — is simple and gorgeous, with a sweet Meyer lemon vinaigrette, grated walnuts and fresh dill. If you don’t have a mandoline, Terry swears a vegetable peeler will achieve the same silky ribbons. The recipe is one of 100 in his new cookbook, “Vegetable Kingdom: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes” (Ten Speed Press; $30), which he wrote “to make the diversity of food of the plant kingdom irresistible” to his daughters.
The book is organized by which part of the plant you’re eating — seed, bulb, leaf, etc. — and features Afro-asian ingredients and flavors, like pea shoot and peanut salad in creamy ginger dressing, and roasted sweet plantains, pecan and millet salad drizzled with sweet parsley vinaigrette. Terry says a proper dressing is key to a happy salad. So is conditioning the lettuce.
For instance, before dressing his All-green Everything salad, he tenderizes the kale with lemon juice and salt then drizzles on sage dressing, which gets its creaminess from silken tofu.
“I was very intentional about how to properly dress a salad,” Terry says of writing the book. “I encourage people to play around with different vinegars and acids, too.” Tired of lemon? Try kumquats. Always reach for balsamic? You’ll love the lighter rice vinegar. His biggest tip? “Get yourself a good salad spinner,” Terry says. Even he has tried — and failed — to soak up excess water from his greens using paper towels.
Salads play a central role at all of Nancy Silverton’s restaurants, even her meat-centric Chi Spacca on Melrose Avenue. There, the longtime queen of L.A. dining eschews basic insalata mista for thoughtfully prepared seasonal beauties, like a shaved spring vegetable salad with roasted artichokes and dill, or Little Gems with herb breadcrumbs, bacon vinaigrette and grated egg, a spin on the French bistro salad that’s a solid yearround cruncher.
Both recipes — and 15 other swoon-worthy salads — are featured in Silverton’s forthcoming cookbook, “Chi Spacca: A New Approach to American Cooking” (Alfred A. Knopf; on sale April 28). The book, whose title means “she (or he) who cleaves,” is a collection of what she and executive chef Ryan Denicola serve at the restaurant. It’s inspired by how an Italian butcher might cook and eat, or more accurately, how Silverton would cook and eat if she was a butcher.
And, well, she’d eat a lot of vegetables. “Salads and vegetables are even more important at Chi Spacca because you really crave them when you’re eating a large format piece of meat,” she explains.
You’ll notice common elements to Silverton’s epic salads: She layers them with complementary flavors and textures; she uses unusual lettuce varieties, like escarole, which replaces romaine in her Spacca Caesar; and she cooks most of her vegetables, including the artichokes in that shaved spring salad, on the floor of her wood-burning oven.
“That’s going to give us the best color and flavors,” she says. But Silverton’s most important salad tool is far more simple. It’s her hands. “I’ve never tossed a salad with anything but my hands,” she says. “That’s really key to a successful salad. You have to make sure that the dressing is evenly distributed and it’s just not going to happen with a pair of tongs.”
And if you want virtually no tools — and a kitchen sink of spring greens — look to spring greens with salami croutons, a salad from blogger Teri Turner’s 2019 cookbook, “No Crumbs Left: Recipes for Everyday Food Made Marvelous” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $30). The Whole30-approved salad is simply a platter of blanched English peas, snap peas and asparagus halves served on a bed of watercress and arugula with a zesty lemon chive vinaigrette.
And yes, you can start putting salami “croutons” on everything.