Nebraska · Salad
Nebraska Wilted Lettuce Salad
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, fresh herbs arguing happily on top.
Ingredients
- 1 large head leaf lettuce, torn
- 4 rashers bacon, diced
- 3 scallions, sliced
- 3 tbsp bacon drippings
- 3 tbsp cider vinegar
- 1 tbsp sugar
- Salt and coarse black pepper
- 1 hard-boiled egg, chopped
The skills inside
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out
Allergen screen
Found: egg
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
- Render the bacon until crisp; lift out and reserve, keeping the drippings hot.
- Put the torn lettuce and scallions in a bowl.
- Add the sugar, vinegar, salt, and pepper to the hot drippings and swirl.
- Pour the hot dressing over the lettuce and toss immediately: it wilts the greens just so.
- Top with the bacon and chopped egg and serve at once.
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.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
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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