Lyon & Burgundy · Salad
Salade Lyonnaise
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, richness that coats and comforts, on a drift of smoke.
Ingredients
- 2 heads frisée, pale hearts only, about 250 g
- 180 g smoked poitrine, cut into thick lardons
- 4 very fresh eggs
- 80 g stale pain de campagne, in cubes
- 1 garlic clove, halved
- 1 shallot, finely chopped
- 30 ml red wine vinegar, plus 20 ml for the poaching water
- 15 g Dijon mustard
- 30 ml groundnut oil
- fine salt and coarse black pepper
The skills inside
Poaching eggsDry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nutsRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: egg · peanuts · 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
- Wash the frisée hearts and dry them hard in a cloth; water left on the leaves dilutes the hot dressing to nothing.
- Render the lardons from cold in a dry pan until the fat runs clear and the edges crisp but the centres still yield. Lift them out, fry the bread cubes in the fat until gold, then rub them with the cut garlic.
- Poach the eggs one at a time in water at 82C (180F) with the 20 ml vinegar, until the white is opaque and set but the yolk still swings loose inside it, about 3 min. Slip them into cold water. 3 min
- Off the heat, whisk the mustard, shallot, the 30 ml vinegar and the oil into the hot pan fat; it should turn cloudy and slightly thick rather than separating into pools.
- Pour the hot dressing over the frisée and toss until the leaves slump but still crackle, add lardons and croutons, sit an egg on each plate and grind the pepper at the table.
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.
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.
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
- 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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