It casts the same spell as pizza. You'd have a hard time finding someone who doesn't really enjoy it. It even works on people who don't generally like salads.
I don't like it. I like salads that have tasty, fresh, delicious vegetables (and often fruits and/or nuts) where the dressing just adds some pizazz and tartness.
To me caesar salad is just dressing where the lettuce is only there to act as scaffolding.
Agreed. The things with "salad" in the name that I've gotten at Mediterranean restaurants have been delicious combinations of multiple ingredients. The things with "salad" in the name that I've gotten at American restaurants have been bowls of lettuce with a few other things thrown in.
I make my Caesar with kale and arugula, shave broccoli with a peeler then roast them, and add pine nuts plus roasted garlic lemon chickpeas in addition to croutons for even more and healthier crunch. It’s also delicious with just oil.
This is exactly why I love Cesar salads. I have always disliked vegetables, trying many times in my life to eat them more because that's what health "experts" say we need to do.
I don't like vegetables fresh, I don't like them grilled, I don't like them stewed.
Cover them in Cesar dressing tho and I can eat an extra large salad (hopefully with some protein too).
Its not health "experts" but literally whole nutrition science, or science in general. Its like saying "experts" claim evolution, but I know better.
Jeez, I know this is predominantly US forum which is a place with its own fucked up nutrition and general eating problems that whole world sees, but this?
You simply have some (easy to dispose of if actually tried) mental barriers when food needs to be salty, greasy, sweet etc. and rest is untolerable, and salads are a rabbit food (or variant of these, heard it many times in many cultures). This all can be unlearned and new things learned, human mind is not that complex and can be molded like clay with a tiny bit of resolve, it doesn't even take a long time.
Nutrition science is a cesspool. We know there are essential vitamins, amino acids, and fatty acids, beyond that it's all "well, we asked people what they ate and tried to match it with some health outcomes." Bodies are complex, determining causation is hard, and we are mostly not there yet.
OK salad gatekeeper. So I'm guessing you've never had a spinach salad, which is nearly always prepared with something like slivered almonds or walnuts and a slightly tart fruit like strawberries or sliced apples?
That's an incredibly American take IMO. Pizza is loved worldwide... Caesar salad?! Where are the famous Caesar salad global chains? I don't think it's much of a thing in Europe, at least.
I don't think that was the point the comment was trying to make. Like - it's easy to stand on a street corner and eat a slice of pizza (or grab one and run!), it's much harder to eat dressed leaves.
I read their point as being: the first time you try pizza you're like "this is delicious and amazing." The first time you try Caesar salad it lights you up in the same magical way.
I could be wrong of course - but that definitely fits my own experience. The first time I had a chicken CS as a kid in a restaurant, it was all I wanted to eat every time we went out for months afterwards. I genuinely couldn't believe 'salad' could be so delicious.
Since you’ve travelled enough to have a greater understanding, could you share with us your knowledge of a culture that makes flatbread but doesn’t put stuff on top of it? Where is that culture? What is their flatbread called?
Maybe, but it simply isn't a thing here. I think the only time I've seen it is in McDonald's. I literally had to google it because I only heard the name but didn't know what it was.
It is precisely a salad for people who don't generally eat salads.
The big uncut leaves are suited for slow nibbling of token amounts of salad.
Croutons are recognizable from a distance as a non vegetable ingredient, making it attractive to someone who'd rather not eat vegetables at all. To me they're just stale bread.
I'd think that peoples' main objection to salad is the uncooked veggies, which isn't addressed at all with caesar salad. I don't generally trust raw vegetables to not make me sick. Especially in the US.
> The big uncut leaves are suited for slow nibbling of token amounts of salad.
Basically anything you put into a salad is better off in a soup or stew, or heavily treated with such low-ph liquid (e.g. salsa, pickled veggies, etc) as to remove the risk. If it isn't suited for canning, I'm not going to eat it.
Perhaps in a country with better-regulated food production it would seem more reasonable.
There were 19 deaths in the US blamed on food-borne illnesses from leafy green vegetables in the 40 years from 1973 to 2012 [1]. If you’re avoiding salad out of safety concerns I hope you never go anywhere near any motorized vehicle.
If it’s an excuse not to eat salads because you don’t like them then fine, but maybe just own your food preferences instead of grossly exaggerating the dangers.
There’s likely multiple orders of magnitude difference between the numbers that “were reported” as part of a known outbreak vs the number of associated deaths that actually took place. People often get admitted without identification of what specific food caused them issues.
Further there’s reasons to avoid things that don’t result in deaths. “Each year in the United States an estimated 9 million people get sick, 56,000 are hospitalized, and 1,300 die of a foodborne disease caused by known pathogens.”
So their salad avoidance isn’t as extreme a reaction as you’re suggesting.
Cooking changes the nutrient profile of ingredients. So eating some raw ingredients makes it much easier to get some vitamins like C which rabidly break down at high temperatures.
If your that concerned consider keeping some raw foods like oranges, bananas, pomegranate, onions etc which involve removing pealing the outer layer before consumption.
Nobody thinks twice in Europe about eating any raw vegetable, fruit, eggs, heck even raw fish or beef in carpaccio.
You are claiming some negligible risk from food poisoning that is in some level present in every country globally, and you are not incorrect. But with such mindset, world is such a very dangerous place that it isn't worth discovering it. Which would be a grave mistake, life is too short and you would miss most of the 'juice' life offers, which never comes without objective risks.
> Nobody thinks twice in Europe about eating any raw vegetable, fruit, eggs, heck even raw fish or beef in carpaccio.
This is one of the weirder “everybody/nobody in Europe does x” claims I’ve seen.
There’s no way you know what the fast majority of Europeans think and I know many Europeans who absolutely do avoid eating raw eggs.
Apologies for my non-native English. I'll try putting more words on it and maybe it will come out less convoluted.
It's easier to eat a lot of salad when it's finely cut. Then you just shovel in a portion with a bit of everything with every grab of the fork or spoon. With a large piece of lettuce, you need to cut it first, and then stab the piece with the fork, and then combine with other ingredients. Which makes eating that kind of salad a slow process. That's what I meant by "suited for slow nibbling of token amounts".
You just have to go to any place where dairy isn't part of the typical diet and people don't usually like either on first exposure. Cheese is an acquired taste for sure, we just live in a place where nearly everyone has acquired it. Not a global norm, however.
From TFA: While the exact original recipe is no longer offered – today, the dressing uses Worcestershire, anchovies, Tabasco and lemon along with roasted and raw garlic – foodies still flock to Caesar’s Restaurants to get the original tableside show.
I make a great Caesar and the secret is a lot of anchovy. Even people who claim to hate anchovies love it and are surprised when I tell them how much I add.
One tube of anchovy paste, one tin of anchovy filets (chopped), fresh pressed garlic, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire, hot sauce, parmesan, black pepper, and olive oil.
How much dressing do you make at once, and for how many single-person large salads? Can you tell us the size/weight of the tube of paste and the anchovy tin?
I agree that anchovy is the secret, but I don’t use nearly this much for two salads, for me and my wife. I use half a jar of filets, which I more or less mince/mash. Do you leave big chunks in the dressing from the chopped filets? If so, I would guess that they are maybe a quarter the size of a caper, do you go bigger?
Do you make a lot of dressing and save it? We make it fresh every time, which also makes the batch size smaller.
1.6 oz tube of paste and 2 oz tin of filets. I chop the filets fairly well but not so much that they become a paste, too. This makes enough dressing for a very large salad (with two romaine hearts and one or two full romaines). I have made it and saved some and it keeps fairly well, but I typically make it fresh.
The first chicken Caesar salad I ever had was, I believe, at Metro Grill during the summer of 2006. I was not (and still am not) much of a salad fan, but that was the salad that made me say "maybe I can learn to like salad."
Good salad is delicious. I think more people would realize that if they weren't exposed to nothing but iceberg, cheddar, and ranch monstrosities during childhood.
Standing up here for iceberg, I think a proper wedge with blue cheese and bacon is delicious. The crispness is refreshing. Not as nutritional as other salads, but sure goes well with a steak and a martini.
The greatest, and the most American sandwich in the world. The BLT is incredibly balanced, I feel like all three elements are stars in their own right.
Hint - it existed long before they claim it did. I have found similar recipes for dressing going back hundreds of years.
Also what's with the lazy restauranteurs allowing their employees to serve lettuce without even chopping it? That's a deal breaker for me, if I am expected to chop the lettuce myself I'm ordering tap water only and no food and never ever EVER going back lol.
A classic Caesar uses whole leaves; the dish was originally meant to be eaten with hands. You can have whatever preferences you like, but I don't think the attitude you're expressing it with is helpful.
Sure, the enjoyment of food involves etiquette and aesthetics. When I learned to cook (from my mom), she said that a knife should never enter the salad plate, and if it does, the cook should be embarrassed.
Of course I'm influenced by that lesson, even though it's perfectly arbitrary and I don't always follow it myself, nor do I complain if it's not strictly adhered to.
I'm curious about these similar dressing recipes as I've found nothing similar enough to call them the same thing.
I've seen plenty of anchovy/mustard/aioli dressings that one might call predecessors, but they lack the egg yolks, parmigiano reggiano and Worcestershire sauce, so they would not taste like Caesar salad dressing.
> surprisingly, it doesn’t involve a certain Roman emperor.
Not surprising at all. Modern historians regard Augustus as the first emperor, whereas Julius Caesar is considered the last dictator of the Roman Republic.
This reminds me of a surprisingly good buffet lunch at a tourist spot in New Zealand's south island where the chef would prepare the Caesar salad right in front of you. You could pick and choose your ingredients, which was nice, but the really unique approach was that the chef mixed the salad in a "bowl" cut into a wheel of Parmesan cheese. This thoroughly coated every leaf with cheesy goodness. Best salad I've ever had in my life!
Once I started making my own Caesar salad dressing at home, Caesar salads for me at home went from meh to unbelievable... basically what you'd get at a nice restaurant. So make your own dressing and never buy the bottled stuff... it's so worth it.
I also add fresh cooked bacon (NEVER bacon bits) and capers.
Microplane for the win, and get the minced garlic into the oil as fast as possible. Once the crushed garlic is exposed to air it's flavor starts to change quickly. Planing directly into the oil and stirring it in to coat the particles as quickly as possible preserves the bright spicy flavor of the garlic.
Every time I mince garlic with a microplane it ends up containing what I would call an unhealthy amount of thumb skin. I don’t even know how I still have a fingerprint on my thumb…
And like 9 egg yolks. I see stuff like this and think about Dave Arnold experimenting and finding that you can emulsify like an oil drum of grapeseed with a single egg.
I was last-week weeks old when I learned the cool America's Test Kitchen trick for vinaigrettes, which is to make them with a combination of extra virgin and neutral oil so they don't set up (and thus break) in the the fridge. Also: a good reason to get a 3-pack of cheap Oxo squeeze bottles; shake to re-emulsify. Vinaigrette is one of the most useful condiments there is.
A yolk, a tsp of dijon, pepper, little salt, juice half a lemon, couple dashes of Worcestershire, couple anchovy filets, half a garlic clove.
Blend homogenous with a stick blender. Then slowly blend in a stream of neutral oil; get it to mayonnaise consistency. Taste and adjust (probably wants pepper). Then: back it out to dressing consistency with water (or lemon juice) a tsp at a time. [†]
Knobs (do any/all/none): grate pecorino or parm, just a bit, into the dressing in the first stage. Double, triple, or quadruple the anchovies. Add some white wine vinegar along with the lemon juice. Microplane the garlic (careful, will really amp the garlic). Before thinning back to dressing consistency with water, add some extra virgin. Pinch of MSG.
If you're being hardcore (ie date night), before you start the dressing, fill a ziploc with ice and put it in your salad bowl, and put your serving bowls in the freezer. Also hardcore: use half as much garlic, and make up the difference with 2x as much garlic confit.
Don't do the thing where you build the dressing on the salad (like, cracking an egg into the bowl or whatever). It's a parlor trick, not a way to dial in the ideal Caesar. Also don't bother with the "rub the garlic into the salad bowl" thing; just makes it harder to dose the garlic.
Extra tip: freshly roasted brussels sprouts love Caesar dressing. (Roasted brussels sprouts love any bright high-fat sauce; Caesar is just the platonic ideal.)
Keeps about a week in the fridge, but each time you use it, refresh the acid (just a splash or lemon juice or vinegar).
(I make a lot of Caesars).
Take a step back and see a Caesar as an anchovy vinaigrette, and then you can immediately vary it to different settings --- lime instead of lemon, add some chile (or aji amarillo), tortilla instead of croutons, fresca instead of parm.
[†] You can also just blend neutral oil in until you get the dressing consistency you want; theoretically you'll get a better texture and a little more flavor concentration this way, but I think the win is marginal vs. being able to knock this dressing out mechanically without thinking hard about it, and you can just dial up the flavors a bit beforehand if you're worried.
I'll have to try that out. My current version substitutes mayonnaise in place of the yolk and oil, and just mixes it with lemon juice, dijon, garlic powder, and pepper.
I use mayo as the base also, but: I make my own mayo, which I cannot recommend more highly. The serious eats stick blender recipe changed my mayo life: It's easier to just make some on demand then to keep store-bought stuff on hand, and it's _so_ much better.
(And customizable - I usually make mine with a little more garlic. This last time I tried making it with a whole-grai. Mustard and the results were delightful.)
I never have to worry about stocking it and checking to make sure it's still good, etc. I always have eggs, lemon, mustard, garlic, and oil on hand. And then I have a small tub for two weeks.
It's literally a three minute recipe that I can autopilot.
Some years ago tried Caesar salad many
times and settled on the recipe below.
The Caesar dressing is in the family of
oil and vinegar mixtures with flavorings
and emulsifiers.
The salad also has croutons (pieces of
toast flavored with some of the dressing)
and grated hard, dry cheese, Parmesan or
Pecorino Romano (and I prefer the second).
The lettuce is Romaine. If separate the
leaves, rinse them, shake dry, wrap in
some clean kitchen towels, refrigerate for
several hours, then the lettuce usually
will be crisp, which is desirable. Just
before combining all the ingredients to
make the actual salad, tear the leaves
into irregular pieces.
For the egg, boil it the 10 seconds not to
cook the egg but to sterilize the
outside before cracking the egg.
=====
Note:
This oil/vinegar mixture has close to the
usual (by volume) 3 parts of the oil to 1
part of vinegar. For a brighter flavor,
might use more vinegar, maybe as high as a
ratio of 3 to 2.
And the other measurements here are also
subject to change.
One issue is, some of the ingredients,
e.g., basil, oregano, parsley, fresh
versus dried, can vary in flavor by a lot.
Some garlic is mild and some very strong.
And the flavors of the red wine vinegar
and olive oil vary.
So, the results tend to vary, between two
cooks a lot and even between two trials by
one cook.
So for each trial, it's good to have good
notes on what did so that can repeat the
trial if it was good or adjust the trial
if it was not.
So, the notes here are from some trials
that seemed good but are subject to
adjustment.
=====
Abbreviations (common in the US)
T -- tablespoon
t -- teaspoon
C -- cup
=====
Good to have three bowls, 1 quart plastic
or stainless, 5 quart stainless, ~3 quart
wooden.
The wooden bowl is for style and the
serving, and the large volume of the 5
quart bowl is to ease tossing the
croutons and lettuce to coat them with the
Caesar dressing.
=====
Caesar Dressing.
In a one quart bowl, combine
1 egg boiled 10 seconds
1 T Worcestershire sauce
2/3 C red wine vinegar (what you pay
for wine vinegar can vary
significantly)
1 1/2 T finely minced garlic
3 T Dijon mustard (what you pay for
the mustard can vary significantly)
1/2 T basil (fresh or dried)
1/2 T oregano (fresh or dried)
2 T parsley (fresh or dried)
1/2 t salt
1/2 t freshly ground black pepper
One 2 ounce can flat anchovies packed
in oil, minced, with the oil
2 C olive oil (what you pay for olive
oil can vary significantly)
Combine all but the olive oil. Whip to
start the emulsification of the oil and
vinegar with the egg and mustard
emulsifiers.
Add olive oil slowly with whipping. Seek
good emulsification of the oil with the
vinegar and the rest.
Makes about 3 C.
=====
Grated Cheese.
Grate some solid Parmesan or Pecorino
Romano hard, dry cheese to yield ~1 C of
grated cheese.
=====
Toast for Croutons.
Toast four slices of bread (might use some
bread other than US lunch box white
bread). Stack the four slices and cut in
two parallel cuts, rotate 90 degrees and
repeat so cut each slice of toast into 9
pieces.
=====
Dress the Lettuce.
In 5 quart stainless steel bowl, tear
three Romaine hearts into irregular
pieces.
Add 3/4 C of the dressing (right, will
have plenty of dressing left over for more
salads).
Toss.
Goal is to flavor the lettuce with the
dressing but still keep the lettuce crisp,
not wet or 'soggy'; so try to use the
least dressing for the needed flavor.
Notes:
A nice way to present and serve is with a
stylish wooden salad bowl full of the
salad with croutons and grated cheese on
top.
Thus the stylish wooden bowl is too small
for tossing; use the 5 quart bowl for
tossing and the wooden bowl for presenting
and serving.
For the serving, might also use some
stylish wooden salad tongs or fork and
spoon.
=====
Toss Croutons.
Add the cut toast to the 5 quart bowl and
toss with some of the salad dressing.
Goal is just to flavor the toast but keep
it crisp, not soft or soaked.
Add the toast on top of the dressed
lettuce in the wooden salad bowl.
=====
Sprinkle the grated cheese over the toast.
=====
Serve.
=====
With the egg, bread, cheese, and oil, it's
filling.
The egg is not cooked to sterilize the outside, it is a coddled egg, part cooked outside the shell historically. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coddled_egg These emulsify differently from raw egg.
The number of people served varies, but a guess is 4: It has 4 pieces of bread, about 80 C (calories) per person. The 1 cup of cheese would be 1/4 C per person, and 1/4 cup of that cheese is enough to be noticed. The 3 heads of Romaine is 3/4 a head per person, and that's plenty for a salad. Could add up to ~300 calories, which is a lot for just part of a meal, just a salad, and not a full meal or even a main dish. So, might follow it with something with a lot of protein, a grilled T-bone steak, grilled/roasted chicken, etc.
But, the dressing yields about 3 cups with 2 cups of oil (plus the oil with the anchovies). The 2 cups is 32 tablespoons at 125 calories per tablespoon, ..., might feed 32 people. In that case, leave the dressing as is and increase the lettuce, bread, and cheese.
You can dial back (or away) anchovies and dial up Worcestershire, but Worcestershire is just British fish sauce. There's a long-running message board thing about whether anchovies are "authentic" to the original Caesar; for me, anchovies are basically the point of a Caesar (not whole filets on top of the leaves, just blitzed into the dressing).
What tradition is that though, like when you omit the fish content?
Ive had good salad dressings like this where they actually list worschestchire sauce and then in the parenthetical ingredients to that it doesnt have any anchovy or fish given and also not in the usualy summation of various allergenic food categories. I just worry its hidden in the Natural Flavor bullcrap
