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Bread Salad Anyone?
Another one of my favorite salads, year round, is bread salad. If you haven’t had it before, you might think it sounds either boring or disgusting. It’s not either. It’s certainly not for anyone on a low-carb diet.
I actually have several different bread salad recipes that I make. A couple use homemade croutons from a good loaf of bread. There’s one with Tuscan flavors and the one with Mexican flavors. I also make a Middle Eastern bread salad called Fatoosh with toasted pita bread.
I first discovered my favorite bread salad recipe in a Rick Bayless cookbook. The way I make it most often now still bears a resemblance to the original recipe with my own touches. His recipe used a Caesar dressing with croutons, tomatoes, scallions, olives, and cilantro, which I still use, but I make an eggless dressing, left out the cheese, and add a avocado when I have one.
This is another salad that is flexible about its ingredients. I had leftover dressing from a batch made earlier in the week, but I was out of some of the ingredients I like to use. What I did have were fresh green beans, so I cut about ¼ pound of the beans into 1-inch pieces, cooked them, and mixed them in. The beans gave the salad great color. I also threw in a handful of toasted pumpkins seeds. You can also substitute chopped onion for the scallions, if you prefer.
My favorite local bread to make the croutons from would be a Francese from Iggy’s Bread of the World. I don’t bother cutting off the crust. I make fairly large croutons, ¾ to 1 inch cubes. In the evening, I’ll cut up a whole loaf and toast the cubes in a 350F oven for 8 to 10 minutes, until they are just slightly brown. Then I’ll turn off the oven and leave it overnight. They turn out just right. If you plan to use them right after toasting, they probably need to bake for 10 to 15 minutes instead.
While this salad is best in the summer when ripe local tomatoes are available, I’ve made it successfully with a carton of grape tomatoes in the off season.
One other thing to keep in mind… Only make as much as you are going to eat right away. This salad does not keep until the next day. The bread gets too soggy, and it just doesn’t look or taste very nice. However, for just Howard and me, I simply halve the recipe and make it a few nights in a row.
Give it a try. You won’t be disappointed.
Mexican Caesar Bread Salad
Serves 4
Caesar Dressing:
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 3 Tbsp Dijon mustard
- ¼ cup lime juice
- 6 Tbsp olive oil
- 2 Tbsp water
- 1 tsp sugar
- 2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
- Salt and pepper to taste
4-5 cups croutons (¾ to 1-inch cubes)
1 large tomato, diced
½ cup Kalamata olives, quartered lengthwise
2 scallions, sliced
1 avocado, diced (optional)
Chopped cilantro leaves
To make the dressing, place all the dressing ingredients in the blender and combine until smooth.
To make the salad, put the remaining ingredients in a very large bowl. Toss gently to combine. Add enough dressing to coat all ingredients well. You might not use all of the dressing.
Let it sit about 10 minutes before serving so the bread can soften up a bit.
We’re Swimming in Beets
I’ve mentioned before that we LOVE beets at our house. I hit the jackpot at Wilson Farm this week. They had three different kinds of beets on offer: regular red beets, golden beets, and candy-cane-striped Chioggia beets. Of course, I bought all three.
My favorite way to cook beets is to roast them, to maximize the sweetness, as the roasting caramelizes the sugars. I also find I can roast the beets a day or before I use them in a salad. I roasted each type of my treasure trove of beets in a separate pan, mostly because I wanted to keep the red ones from staining the others.
With the red and Chioggia beets, I made a couple of batches of our house favorite Roasted Beet Salad with Walnuts.
I used the golden beets in another summer favorite, Russian Salad. I’m not exactly sure why this is called Russian Salad. As best I can tell, it has its origin in Salade Olivier, a recipe originally created by a famous Russian chef in the nineteenth century. That recipe included meats and was bound with a secret type of mayonnaise. I’ve had versions of Salade Olivier made by Russian colleagues, and while my recipe shares some ingredients, it is quite different. This salad is vegetarian, and the dressing is a vinaigrette, not mayonnaise, making it much lighter.
This is not truly a beet salad since it contains several different vegetables, including golden beets and wax beans. Since these two vegetables are usually only available from farmers’ markets, this is definitely a seasonal salad.
I suppose you could use red beets, but then the colors would just blend together. It’s so pretty with its assorted colors: green, white, orange, and two shades of yellow. The capers and chopped pickles add a vinegary surprise to the vegetables.
Russian Salad
Serves 6-8
Adapted from Verdura: Vegetables Italian Style by Viana La Place
1 bunch golden beets (3 or 4 beets)
2 medium red-skinned potatoes
¼ lb wax beans, ends trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
¼ lb green beans, ends trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
2 carrots, peeled and diced into ¼-inch pieces
3 Tbsp capers
2 Tbsp chopped cornichons (or dill pickles)
3 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
Preheat the oven to 450F. Scrub the beets, and place in a small baking pan. Add about ½ inch water to the bottom of the pan and cover tightly with foil. Bake for 1 hour, or until the beets are tender. When the beets are cool enough to handle, the skins should slip right off. Trim the ends. Dice into ¼-inch pieces. Add to a large mixing bowl.
In a medium saucepan, steam the potatoes in a steamer basket until the potatoes are tender, about 30 minutes. When the potatoes are cool enough to handle, dice into ¼-inch pieces. I leave them unpeeled. Add the potatoes to the bowl with the beets.
Fill a medium saucepan with water, bring to a boil. Add the beans, and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, scoop the beans out of the pot, and add to a bowl filled with ice cubes and water to stop the cooking.
In the same pot of boiling water, add the carrots, and cook until tender, about 3 minutes. We don’t need the water anymore, so either scoop the carrots from the pot with the slotted spoon, or just drain. Add to the same bowl of water to stop the cooking.
Drain the bowl of vegetables, and dry them off with a clean dishtowel. Add the vegetables to the beets and potatoes in the bowl. Add the capers and pickles to the bowl.
Whisk the olive oil and vinegar together. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Pour the dressing over the vegetables and gently toss everything together until the vegetables are mixed together and coated with dressing.
A Plateful of Happiness 