Oregon · Salad
Hood River Pear and Blue Cheese Salad
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with toasted, nutty warmth throughout, richness that coats and comforts, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 3 ripe Hood River pears, sliced thin
- 200g mixed bitter greens
- 150g Oregon blue cheese, crumbled
- 100g hazelnuts, toasted and chopped
- For the dressing: 3 tbsp hazelnut or olive oil, 2 tbsp cider vinegar, 1 tsp honey, 1 tsp Dijon, salt and pepper
The skills inside
Building an emulsionDry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts
The words inside
Chicories & Bitter GreensPearPrickly Pear
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · nuts · 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
- Toast the hazelnuts and rub off their skins.
- Whisk the dressing until emulsified and taste for balance: it should be sharp enough to answer the pear.
- Toss the greens lightly with just enough dressing to coat.
- Arrange the pear slices over and scatter the blue cheese and hazelnuts.
- Grind pepper over and serve at once, before the pears brown.
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.
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.
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes
- A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
- It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
- It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
- It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
- The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.
Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre)
- Also Right
- Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Berliner weisse
- Zero-Proof
- Cucumber-lime water
Green plates want green wines: vinaigrette’s acid meets its match, and the difficult vegetables surrender to Grüner.
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