F Scott's' Caesar Salad recipe
Adventures Of A Black Belt Sommelier
My recipe for the best Caesar Salad you have ever tasted
Well, welcome back to adventures of a bike belt. So may I, as I've mentioned before in these episodes in the late 80s, early 90s, I owned a restaurant in Nashville called F. Scott's. Ironically, I nailed it up about three miles from Para F. Scott Fitzgerald was born. But anyway, it was a nice restaurant. It developed into a really special restaurant, which I've told the story of before. But, you know, it was this neighborhood strip mall restaurant. We had eventually had a really great chef, and we obviously had a really good wine program with me as the owner. But, you know, we had, we started getting requests from our customers that they really wanted us to serve, have a Caesar salad on the menu. And my feeling about things like Caesar salad is that it's no matter how good your Caesar salad is, everybody's got their idea of the best Caesar salad they've ever had. And your Caesar salad is never going to match up to their idea of their favorite Caesar salad they've ever had. This kind of applies to things like Caesar salad, you know, crab cakes, things like that, you know, standard ubiquitous dishes that everybody's they've everybody's had one in one place that they think is the best. And yours and never going to be that good. So I kind of resisted putting a Caesar salad on the menu, because I just didn't want to be the second or third best Caesar salad that my customers had eaten. Eventually, they weren't down. So I started, we started my chef Josh weekly, and I we started working on a Caesar salad recipe that would measure up that we could complain. What I said was, I'm not going to serve Caesar salad until I can feel confident that our customers will think it's the best Caesar salad they've ever eaten. So we started working on this recipe. One of the things we did, I had my pastry chef, bake Parmesan garlic, loves of bread, and we made the croutons from that, those, that made a big difference, because croutons weren't just generic, they weren't flavorless, they were, they tasted like the salad kind of bread for version of the salad. And that made a big difference in the quality of the salad. Of course, you know, fresh iceberg lettuce, you know, crisp, crisp. So those are those are the two ingredients other than dressing. So eventually we did develop a recipe that I thought for the dressing that I thought was good enough that we would start serving it. And we did and our customers loved it. We got tremendous great feedback. At lunch, we served it along with some smoked salmon that we smoked in-house and horseradish cream sauce with salmon and dinner. We served it as a salad course. It was, it was well received. So I'm going to share the recipe we developed for the Caesar salad. And I'm sorry I'm going to look now because I can't, you know, I have to read it. I don't, it's too many ingredients to remember them off the top of my head. So here are the ingredients. One extra large egg yolk at room temperature. It is very important that the egg yolk be room temperature. If it's cold, the dressing won't turn out as well as you want to. Two teaspoons of Dijon mustard, you can use your favorite and we use grape peu pon, but any Dijon mustard, but Dijon mustard, not French, it's something. Two large cloves of garlic chopped. So I've changed this recipe to be like a small portion instead of what we made. So the next ingredient is a can of anchovies in oil. Not the ones that have capers in them. And if you're not, if you're going to refuse to use the anchovies, don't bother trying this recipe because it won't turn out. You're just going to make ranch dressing and you can do, you can buy ranch dressing that's just good. So you, if you take the anchovies out of Caesar salad dressing, it's not Caesar salad dressing anymore. So don't eliminate this anchovies from this recipe. I just use one of those little oval tins with the oil and the anchovies there. I put it all in there. A half a cup of freshly squeezed lemon juice. Use the fresh lemon juice. Squeeze the lemon yourself. Don't buy those little plastic lemons in the grocery store. Two teaspoons of kosher salt. It's important, it's kosher salt, not iodized salt. One and a half cups of good mild olive oil. This is the quality of your Caesar salad dressing will be dependent on the quality of the olive oil. You have to use high quality olive oil. The better the olive oil, the better your Caesar salad dressing is going to be. And then half cup of Parmigiano Regiano. Again, the better the cheese, the better your Caesar salad dressing is going to be. Don't buy the cheese, that grated cheese that comes with the nozzled plastic tubs. That's not good enough. It won't be as good as you want it to be if you don't use good quality Parmigiano. It's even worth going to like a cheese shop, a specialty cheese shop, not the grocery store to get the cheese because you want it to be really good quality cheese. You want to be really good quality olive oil. You want to use the whole can of anchovies and you want the egg yolk to be real temperature. All those things are important. Okay, so this is how you make it. It's very simple. You put the egg yolks, the mustard, the garlic, anchovies, the lemon juice, salt and pepper into a food processor and process all that until it's perfectly smooth. Then with it running, very slowly add olive oil to it because basically what you're making is mayonnaise and let it process until it's thick. Then add the grated Parmesan and just pulse it a few times. Pour it into some kind of container that you can put in the refrigerator. In my experience, it's best to let it let it chill in the refrigerator for about three hours before you use it because it will thicken up and homogenize. If you do that, if you use it right away, it'll be delicious but won't be as delicious as if you let it chill in the refrigerator for three hours or so. Then toss it with the tosses. It's your up to your palate, how much dressing, romaine, lettuce, ratio you want it to be and how many croutons you want it to be. But just before you're going to serve it, toss the romaine with the amount of dressing that you enjoy and the croutons. Write some freshly ground black pepper on top. You can even write some a little bit more cheese on top. It'll be fantastic. I promise you'll be fantastic. Crisp the lettuce first and keep it in the refrigerator so it's cold too. The romaine lettuce to be cold to when you add the dressing and then toss it and serve it. It'll be great. I promise you it'll be well back then it was the best season salad anybody ever. Any of my customers that ever had, that's what they told us over and over and over again. And I still make it today that way and I think it's the best season salad I've ever tasted. But of course I'm a little biased. Try it. Let me know what you think. See if you agree with me. Thanks as always for tuning in for Edgesville Blythe Blythe Blythe Blythe. [BLANK_AUDIO]