California · Salad
Cobb Salad
- Easy
- 35 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 1 head romaine and 1 bunch watercress, chopped fine
- 300g cooked chicken breast, diced
- 6 rashers bacon, crisp and crumbled
- 3 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
- 2 avocados, diced
- 2 tomatoes, diced
- 150g Roquefort, crumbled
- For the vinaigrette: 6 tbsp olive oil, 2 tbsp red wine vinegar, 1 tsp Dijon, 1 garlic clove, salt and pepper
- Chives
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · egg · 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
- Chop all the greens very fine and spread across a wide platter.
- Arrange the chicken, bacon, egg, avocado, tomato, and Roquefort in neat parallel rows over the greens.
- Whisk the vinaigrette until emulsified.
- Present the salad in its rows at the table first.
- Dress and toss thoroughly just before serving so every forkful carries everything.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Building an emulsion 40 recipes
- It visibly thickens as the fat goes in, heavier and more opaque than either part was alone, which is the emulsion announcing itself.
- At no point is there a pool of free fat sitting ahead of the work: fat went in no faster than it disappeared into the body.
- Glossy and homogeneous, with no slick floating on top and no visible droplets standing apart in it.
- It clings: coating what it is put on and holding a line, rather than running off and splitting into a puddle at the plate’s edge.
- It survives standing: minutes later there is no ring of weeping liquid underneath and no film of fat breaking out on the surface.
Where it goes wrong The fat went in faster than the shear could break it up, or the temperature drifted out of the range the method needs: it breaks into grease over a thin liquid, and whisking the broken thing harder does nothing. The rescue is a fresh base, with the broken sauce worked into it slowly, as if it were the fat.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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