Nebraska · Salad
Nebraska Dorothy Lynch Salad
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, a silken, spoon-slow texture.
Ingredients
- 1 head iceberg or romaine, chopped
- 2 tomatoes, wedged
- 1 cucumber, sliced
- 1 red onion, sliced
- For Dorothy Lynch-style dressing: 120ml tomato soup, 120ml oil, 80ml vinegar, 100g sugar, 1 tbsp grated onion, 1 tsp celery seed, 1 tsp paprika, salt
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: celery
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
- Blend all the dressing ingredients until smooth and emulsified; it should be sweet, tangy, and tomato-red.
- Chill the dressing at least an hour.
- Chop the greens and vegetables and combine in a bowl.
- Toss with the dressing just before serving.
- Serve cold.
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
- Chianti Classico or Barbera d’Alba
- Also Right
- Vermentino for the lighter plates
- From the Taps
- Italian pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- San Pellegrino Sanbittèr
Tomato’s acid demands equal acid: Italian reds evolved beside the sauce, and the regional pairing is the safest law in wine.
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