North Carolina · Side
Carolina Coleslaw
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light.
Ingredients
- 1 small cabbage, shredded fine
- 1 carrot, grated
- For the dressing: 120ml mayonnaise, 2 tbsp cider vinegar, 1 tbsp yellow mustard, 1 tbsp sugar, 1 tsp celery seed, salt and pepper
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Salting to draw the water outThe overnight rest: letting a dish marry
Allergen screen
Found: egg · celery · mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Shred the cabbage as fine as you can and grate the carrot.
- Salt the cabbage lightly and let it drain in a colander 20 min, then press out the water. 20 min
- Whisk the dressing ingredients together.
- Toss the cabbage and carrot with just enough dressing to coat; it should not be swimming.
- Chill an hour before serving so the flavors marry.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
The overnight rest: letting a dish marry 29 recipes
- Cooled quickly before it went in (spread out, decanted, or stood in cold water) rather than carried to the fridge hot in the pot it was cooked in.
- Protected from the rest of the fridge once cold: covered, or given space where nothing strong is sitting beside it. A rest this long is long enough to take on whatever it shares the shelf with, and some dishes want the open air.
- Given the whole time. This is the one technique whose entire content is waiting, and cutting it short leaves the dish exactly as it was when it went in.
- Brought back deliberately: reheated gently, or brought up to the temperature it is meant to be eaten at, rather than served straight out of the cold because it is late.
- Tasted and corrected AFTER the rest. Seasoning and brightness both flatten in the cold, so the dish is finished at the end of the wait rather than at the start of it.
Where it goes wrong It went into the fridge hot and covered. It held its own heat for hours in the range where food spoils, and the lid sweated and dripped back into it all night: what comes out is duller and wetter than what went in, which is the exact opposite of the point.
Salting to draw the water out 41 recipes
- Salted evenly over every surface rather than tipped on in one place and tossed once.
- Laid out so the water has somewhere to go: a colander, a rack, or a sieve over a bowl, never a flat dish where it sits back in what it gave up.
- Given real time, and there is visible liquid to show for it: a pool underneath, a drip, or a wrung handful.
- That liquid is removed. It is squeezed, blotted or poured away, and the food is dry to the touch before it goes anywhere near heat.
- The dish is seasoned knowing salt has already gone on, tasted before any more is added.
Where it goes wrong It went into the dish still wet, and was salted again out of habit. The water it was carrying dilutes and steams whatever it meets, so the result is watery and over-seasoned at once, and those are two faults that cannot be corrected in the same direction.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.