[This is the seventeenth post in a long series. You may wish to start at the beginning. Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguou
(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)
A good chef’s salad is a thing of beauty. It is both meat and veggies in a wonderfully balanced presentation, and also it’s delicious. Now, most people will agree that a chef’s salad must have meat and cheese in addition to the eggs, but there’s a multitude of different opinions on which meat and cheese to use. This is the recipe that I learned at my first non-fast-food-restaurant job, a college dive bar called the Mason Jar Pub (near my alma mater of George Mason University). It wasn’t a very good restaurant overall, but the chef’s salad was pretty decent, and that’s where I learned to make it. I still love eating it today.
The Protein
In my opinion, the absolute best meats to use are turkey and roast beef. One of the tricks is to find lunch meat that is sliced perfectly: too thick and it’ll be hard to assemble, too thin and it’ll just rip into shreds. Also, turkey that is sliced into a perfect, large circle is ideal; you can be a little more flexible on the shape of the roast beef. Now, you can also cut it yourself, but for one thing it’s a pain in the ass, and for another it’s hard to get the slices just right. Unless you have an industrial meat slicer. But then you’re likely to cut your fingers off, so that’s not a great solution either. Just buy good quality meats with no nitrites and you’ll be fine.
The Cheese
Now, you could use any cheese you like. But I’m going to suggest two criteria to narrow it down:
- You need a cheese with good plasticity. For this reason, I find that cheddar or Swiss are terrible choices. When you try to put everything together, those types of cheese just crumble into a big mess
- I personally think that white cheeses just complement lunch meats better. Sure, a decent Colby could work, but is it going to taste as good as some of your other options?
So the obvious choice is provolone, and it should definitely be your go-to if you have difficulty finding decent choices at your market, or you’re just not adventurous when it comes to cheese. If you can find sliced mozzarella, that could also work, but I find it a bit bland for this particular application. Monterey Jack is not bad, and if you wanted to be super fancy, Edam or Jarlsberg would be the way to go (I think Gouda is both not quite plastic enough and just a bit too strong). But my absolute favorite is havarti. It’s got a great flavor that is mild but not bland, you can often find it pre-sliced,1 and it has the perfect amount of flexibility. If you’ve not yet tried it, definitely give it a go.
The Eggs
The other protein you’ll need is hard-boiled eggs, of course. There’s not much art to boiling an egg, but still some folks have difficulty getting them to that perfect consistency without the annoying green rings forming on them.2 So here’s how I do it.
Possibly you have an electric kettle for boiling water for tea. They’re awesome: you fill it with water, push the button, and voilà: it boils, then turns itself off. They don’t last forever though: after a bit, you’ll find yours starts to look a bit ragged ... maybe it has a few waterspots here and there ... maybe the lid doesn’t fit perfectly any more. So you just buy a new one, right? They’re not that expensive, after all. So what do you do with the old one? Just throw it away, I guess?
No. You use it to hard-boil eggs in.
Two eggs is typically enough for a chef’s salad, but I often do 5 or 6 at a time and just keep them in the fridge.3 You lower the eggs gently into the empty kettle, hopefully not cracking any,4 just barely cover them with cold water, plug it in and hit that button. Now walk away. The water will come to a boil, the kettle turns itself off, then the eggs just sit there as the water slowly cools. Bam! perfect hard-boiled eggs every time. Come back once the water is cool, or whenever you like. Hours later, eve
Dump the water out and either use the eggs right away or stick ’em in the fridge for later. For chef’s salad purposes, peel a couple of eggs and crack out that handy dandy egg slicer I told you to buy when we talked about salad equipment. Open, close, and you have perfect slices; just throw the top and bottom slices out, because they’re all white and no yolk. Unless, you know, you’re into that sort of thing. I usually just feed them to the dog. Or my daughter.
The Dressing
Now, you can put any old sort of dressing on a chef’s salad that you like, but I’m a firm believer that this is the perfect place to break out a lovely Thousand Island dressing. The problem is, most store-bought TI’s are going to be full of stuff that you may not be too thrilled with, like soybean oil, and preservatives, and unnecessary sugar. But, you know what? Thousand Island dressing is one of the simplest things in the world: it’s nothing but mayo, ketchup, and pickle relish.5 You could make that yourself.
So let’s do that.
Thousand Island Dressing
Now, first thing I have to warn you is, it’s practically impossible to make a good Thousand Island dressing without any added sugar, because it’s almost impossible to make ketchup without any added sugar. So this will not be Whole30 compliant, unless you’re dedicated enough to go out and buy Primal ketchup. But you certainly don’t need any sugar beyond what’s in the ketchup itself, so just get a good quality ketchup and don’t stress too much. It won’t have very much sugar.
The second thing I’m going to warn you about is, this isn’t a particularly sweet TI. It’s going to be a bit on the tangy side. Personally, I consider that a feature, but your mileage may vary.
After a lot of fiddling, I’ve managed to come up with the following, easy-to-remember formula:
- 1 squirt of dijon mustard
- 2 heavy pinches of salt
- 3 big spoonfuls of mayo
- 4 generous squirts of ketchup
- 5 small spoonfuls of pickle relish, or 5 whole pickle slices
- 6 grinds of black pepper
For the mayo, just use the homemade mayo I taught you how to make when we did the autumnal salad. For the pickles or relish, my preference is to use dill pickles, from which I make my own relish. You can use sweet relish, or sweet (sometimes called “bread and butter”) pickles, but that’s more sugar, and it’s not necessary.6 You could also buy dill pickle relish, but I’ve never found that anywhere other than Whole Foods, and who can afford that? So just make your own.
If you’re using whole pickle
You can also add some white vinegar, if you want it even more tangy, but I find that the relish will bring along enough vinegar on its own. You can also add a small amount of garlic powder, if you want it to have a bit more sharpness. Or substitute yellow mustard for the dijon if you find it a bit too sharp. But basically it’s just the ketchup, the mayo, and the pickle relish, and everything thing else is just for flavor.8
If you have more than you need for your salad(s), put the rest in a jar and stick it in the fridge. Use it on your burgers, if you like.
Chef’s salad
Once again, you’re ready, and it’s just assembly.
On your cutting board, put down a slice of turkey. Put a slice of roast beef on top, or maybe two slices if they’re small, but don’t overlap them too much. Now lay a slice of cheese over that. Don’t center the roast beef and the cheese on the turkey; rather, make it closer to the edge that’s closest to you. Now roll up the turkey, away from you. The turkey is almost certainly the roundest, and probably the least likely to fall apart, so it’s the best choice for the outside layer. The rolling up will naturally push the inner layers toward the other edge, but, because you placed them off-center, they won’t move enough to push out past the turkey. The stiffness of the cheese will help keep it together too, unless you ignored me and used cheddar or Swiss, in which case it’ll just break into bits and make a big mess. If you do the whole thing right, you get a meat-and-cheese roll-up which will naturally hold itself together. Cut off the messy bits at either end of the roll-up, because they’re not uniform; either just eat them, or feed them to your dog (or, again: to your daughter). Take what’s left and cut it into quarters and turn each on its side: you end up with beautifully marbled discs of awesomeness.
Now do that a few more times if you’re making chef’s salad for the whole family (and why wouldn’t you be?). My general rule of thumb is one roll-up per person and one extra. Two for an individual salad might be too much, but then again you can just eat the extra discs later.9
Put your base veggies in a shallow bowl. Wikipedia will tell you that you need cucumbers and tomatoes at a minimum, but honestly I don’t care for tomatoes in my chef’s salad. (Cucumbers, on the other hand, are always a good call.) But, really, whatever veggies you’ve already got chopped up is fine. Now put your little meat discs on top of the veggies; I like to put one at each compass point and one in the center, but arrange however seems best to you. Put one slice of egg on each disc. Now put a normal amount of the homemade Thousand Island dressing ... maybe even a light amount. Lean toward the lighter side. Personally, while I like to eat my salad veggies with a spoon (I despise chasing small veggie bits around my plate with the fork), you really need to eat the egg-topped discs with a fork in a single bite each ... this may be the only salad where a spork is appropriate. I usually just end up using a fork and a spoon, but you do you. Delicious, nutritious, and very filling.
Next time, we’ll stretch our definition of what “salad” actually means.
1 For instance, I buy that way fro
2 Don’t forget: the green rings are unsightly, but they won’t hurt you. Kind of like when your avocadoes turn brown: you can still eat them safely, they’re just not as pretty.
3 Useful for healthy snacks, and also for other salads. Natch.
4 If you do crack one, you’ll just get wisps of egg white in your water. Which isn’t the end of the world, but it does make a big mess in your electric kettle, which is why you only use old ones for this.
5 Interestingly enough, this is also the exact recipe for the “special sauce” that many burger joints use. Yes, that’s right: your Big Mac basically just has Thousand Island dressing on it.
6 Or, in my opinion, good.
7 If you’ve got an extra pickle jar laying around, you could also do half the jar and save the other half for eating, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not, but my daughter would be irked at me if I didn’t leave her any pickles for snacking on.
8 Okay, the mustard can also help with keeping it from separating in the fridge. But mostly for flavor.
9 Honestly, sometimes I just make these meat-and-cheese cylinders without the salad and just eat them without even bothering to cut them into discs.
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