Caesar Salad Evangelist and 'Cook This Book' author Molly Baz whisks you through homemade mayonnaise, the art of pre-dressing a salad, and properly crispy-crunchy croutons.
On Play Me a Recipe, your favorite cooks will walk you through their most treasured recipes, offering all the insider tips, stories, and tricks you won't get from a written recipe—and you'll be right alongside them, every step of the way. Feel free to pause, jump back, or navigate the steps via the podcast chapters (if you're in Apple Podcasts, swipe up on the episode player page—the podcast chapters will be at the bottom).
If you're cooking along, here's the recipe we're making today. Go ahead and grab the ingredients below (Molly starts listing them at 2:16) before starting the episode.
Molly Baz's Cae Sal
Serves 4
Dairy
Pantry
How did your Cae Sal turn out? We want to hear all about it—leave us a rating + review!
Lobby Time Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Molly Baz: My crouts are out of the oven, and they're golden brown and very crisp. You can hear it when I crunch down on them. (crunching sounds)
Molly: Hi, this is Play Me A Recipe. I'm Molly Baz. I am a cookbook author, recipe developer, just general food person in this world, um, and I just came out with a cookbook called Cook This Book. So today I'm going to walk you through my recipe for the Cae Sal, which, if you don't know me or haven't heard that phrase before, stands for the caesar salad, which is in my opinion, the greatest salad of all time. Um, and I've spent many years perfecting this recipe, and so I thought I would walk you through it. The recipe will be linked in the show notes if you need to refer to it. Um, but otherwise you can just cook right along with me, and I will share all of the ingredient quantities and take you through step by step.
So this is a recipe I've been working on for a long time. I've made thousands if not millions of caesar salads in my day. I've also eaten thousands, if not millions of caesars. It's the one item that when I go to a restaurant, if it's on the menu, there's no chance I'm not ordering. To me, it's just kind of the perfect salad, because it can be a main course and it can be really filling and satisfying, but it's also great as a side with a steak in a more kind of like steakhouse vibe, and I just think it's the most delicious salad on the planet. So I'm going to walk you through the preparation of a classic caesar dressing, which means we're going to be making a mayonnaise by hand. Um, and if you've never made that before, it's not that hard. Um, but we will start with a couple of raw eggs, and emulsify some oil into them. It's not that scary, and I'll walk you through it, and you'll see that homemade mayonnaise is actually one of life's greatest pleasures. So I'm excited to walk you through that.
Molly: So to begin for this recipe, you will need one garlic clove, one lemon, four romaine hearts. Um, if you can't find romaine hearts or if you can find little gems instead, I often like to make caesar salads with little gems, so you could use like five little gems instead of four romaine hearts. Two large eggs, two ounces of grated parmesan cheese, ideally parmigiano reggiano or something, um, pretty well aged. That'll be about a half of a cup if you're buying the pre-grated kind. A half of a crusty baguette, that's about six ounces of bread. If you have other bread lying around, or you have sourdough, or even like a sandwich bread lying around, um, you know, just eyeball about six ounces or so. Two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, some kosher salt, ideally Diamond Crystal--that's the brand that I develop all of my recipes with and I think it is the perfect salt, and really the only salt that anyone should be cooking with. So if you can get your hands on it, grab some Diamond Crystal kosher salt. Coarsely ground black pepper, which should be coming out of a pepper mill if possible, not the pre-ground kind. And then four oil packed anchovy fillets, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a half a cup of some kind of neutral oil. So that could be canola oil, that could be vegetable oil, um, that could be like safflower or sunflower oil, anything that doesn't have a strong flavor. And then one teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce.
Molly: The other things that you'll need to pull out of your cabinets are the equipment that you'll need for this. So grab a large bowl, we're going to make the entire dressing in the bowl and then we're going to toss the salad in the bowl. So think about a bowl that's big enough to hold a caesar salad that serves four people. Um, and then one microplane, if you have one, to help you grate the garlic. If not, no worries, you can mash it to a paste with the side of your knife. A chef's knife and a cutting board. Um, and then you'll need a whisk to make the dressing, and a baking sheet to make the croutons on.
Molly: Okay, so the first thing we're gonna make is the croutons. So um, before we do that, we want to pre-heat our oven to 350° on bake. And take your baguette, about a third of a baguette, and tear it into a bunch of irregularly shaped little craggy crouton bits, so mine are about, I don't know, like an inch and a half. And they're all irregular. And we're tearing these croutons by hand because doing so creates all of these little, sort of like, crevices and nooks and crannies that the oil will cling to. And then those will become supremely crispy, crunchy little crouton boys in the oven. Um, and so I prefer the kind of rustic craggy look of a hand-torn crouton over a cubed one. But if it's not your vibe, you could totally use a bread knife and just turn these into perfect little cubes. And then as you are tearing them, just throw them on a rimmed baking sheet. Um, and you should have about three cups of croutons. No need to measure them, but just kind of eyeball what you think three cups worth of croutons looks like. And that will be just the right amount for a caesar salad that serves four. If you have a whole baguette and you want to use it all, maybe it's going stale, you could make double the croutons and then keep them in an airtight container at room temperature. They'll last for like a week or so. So, great thing to just keep on hand for all manner of salads and things if you've got extra bread.
Okay, so I have about--I would say I'm about three cups with the croutons now, so I'm going to drizzle these croutons generously with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Again, I wouldn't really necessarily measure this out. The recipe calls for two tablespoons of olive oil. That's probably like, five or six seconds of olive oil that's pouring out of the spout, um, and just drizzle that evenly over the croutons, and then season them well with salt and a couple of cranks of black pepper. And then you can use your hands to kind of massage the oil into the croutons to make sure that they're evenly coated all over in oil. And then take a look, and if it feels like you're a little bit shy in the oil department, add a little bit more oil. You really want them to be pretty well-coated, because that oil is going to help them kind of like sizzle and fry and turn into those really dry, really crunchy croutons that we all know and love.
So now that they're all coated, we'll just throw them right into the oven, 350°, and we'll keep an eye on them. They will take probably 15 minutes, could be a little bit less depending on how hot your oven is. We'll just keep an eye on them as they cook.
Molly: Okay, so crouts are in the oven. It is now time to make our caesar dressing.
Molly: So we're gonna start with two large eggs, and crack them. You can crack them over a small bowl if you want to reserve the egg whites, and then you're going to transfer the egg yolks to your large bowl, and that's the bowl where we'll be finishing this salad and kind of tossing it all together. So two egg yolks in the large bowl. And the reason that we use two egg yolks is because it helps really reinforce this dressing. So if you ever heard of a mayonnaise breaking, that refers to when the oil that's being emulsified into the egg yolks and turning it into this really creamy fluffy dressing, um, doesn't incorporate properly or fast enough. And then the dressing splits into this like oily mess. And that's kind of what we're trying to avoid. And by adding a second egg yolk to your dressing, you create a stronger foundation for the emulsion, and so it's more foolproof, fail proof, so less likely to break on you, which is why we do it.
I'm gonna wash my hands. So I've got two egg yolks in my bowl, and now I'm gonna take this one garlic clove and smash it with the side of my knife just to release it from its skin, and then use my micro plane to grate the garlic right into the bowl with the egg yolks. (grating sounds) Okay, now we've got garlic and egg yolks in the bowl, and it's time to add the anchovies. So a classic caesar dressing always has anchovies. I like to use oil-packed anchovies instead of anchovy paste. I just think that they're fresher and meatier and more delicious tasting. Um, this is not an anchovy-forward dressing, so although sometimes anchovies can be scary to some people, um, and they do smell pretty strong and fishy, just know that these four anchovies that I'm asking you to put in this dressing do not equal a fishy anchovy-heavy dressing. They're kind of there as like a background umami note. That said, add more, add less as you see fit, if you want. Although I happen to think this is the perfect amount. So four oil-packed anchovies, and just finally chop them, um, with your knife, and then use the side of your knife, um, to kind of like, work them into a paste. It's sometimes helpful to put a little pinch of salt right onto the pile of anchovies that you've just chopped. That will help act as an abrasive to mash the anchovies into a more homogenous paste. And this can take a minute, so just stay with it until it looks like anchovy paste.
Alright, and then once you feel like they're paste, throw those into your bowl as well. And then take that lemon that you have, and finely grate the zest of the lemon using that microplane into your bowl. You don't need to use the whole thing. I would do about a quarter to a half of the lemon in lemon zest. This is a kind of untraditional addition to caesar salad. Um, I'm just kind of a freak for lemon zest in general. It adds brightness and citrus flavor to dishes without introducing acid, uh, whereas lemon juice adds both of those things, but also introduces acid. Um, and so it's a nice way to get kind of like, more citrus flavor into something without throwing off the balance of acid to fat. We're also going to use the juice of this lemon, but throw some zest in there, and then cut the lemon in half and squeeze the juice of half of the lemon right into the bowl. Catch any of the seeds with your fingers if you can, or pluck them out.
Uh, and lastly one teaspoon of Dijon mustard right into the bowl. Dijon mustard is also an emulsifier, meaning that it will help to create that creamy mayonnaisey emulsion, um, like the egg yolks do. So it's important to have it in there to stabilize this dressing. But also of course, it is a delicious flavor in and of itself, and pretty key flavor and ingredient in a proper caesar dressing. Um, and then grab your whisk. Okay, and then this is a hot little tip, because we're going to be emulsifying quite a bit of oil into this bowl, and we're going to be whisking constantly as we go, it's helpful if you take a damp kitchen towel or even paper towel, any kind of like, rag, and set the bowl on top of it, because the damp towel will help stabilize it on your work surface so it's not slip sliding all around as you try and emulsify a half a cup of oil into it. So I have my bowl now well-secured, and then I'm measuring out a half a cup of vegetable oil. And if you have a liquid measuring cup, you can decant the oil into the measuring cup so that you have something with a spout, and that will make it easier to help stream the oil in in a really thin, steady stream. Um, but if you don't have one, you also could just use a bowl. It's just a little bit of a messier operation. So measure out a half a cup. It's important to measure here, just because like I said, mayonnaises are like, a little bit finicky, and if you add too much oil to this dressing, it risks breaking, and so you don't wanna accidentally add in three quarters of a cup when it can't handle it. So try and measure out exactly 1/2 of a cup.
And then, starting with the thinnest, tiniest, most imperceptible little stream of oil, whisking constantly as you go. (whisking sounds) Start streaming in the oil. Just know that you can always stop if you feel like things are getting out of control and your stream is getting too heavy and you're scared that your emulsion's gonna break. Just stop, take a deep breath, keep whisking, hold off a second on the oil, collect yourself and get back into it. I'm making this sound a lot scarier than it is. It's really not that scary. You're just emulsifying oil into eggs. No big deal. This is gonna take you a couple of minutes, so stay at it. (long sequence of whisking sounds)
You'll start to notice as more oil gets incorporated into it that it's starting to get a little bit thicker and a lot paler in color. And that's just because you start with the egg yolks and you're adding something translucent to it, it's thinning out the color of it. So the egg yolks are now light yellow, you're also aerating it, and the more oil you add, the lighter and fluffier it will become.
Molly: Okay, so all of my oil is emulsified into my dressing, and the dressing itself has the consistency almost of like lemon curd. It's thick and it's pale yellow and it's super creamy, and now we are going to add the remaining ingredients to it. So I'm seasoning it with salt, about 3/4 of a teaspoon of salt. And lots and lots of freshly ground black pepper. It is imperative that you use pepper from a pepper mill that you're grinding freshly, right into the dressing, because grinding it à la minute, as they say, helps unlock all of the delicious, fragrant, spicy floral flavor in a peppercorn. Whereas that stuff that you get that's in a little shaker jar has been ground lord knows how long ago. There's--it's kind of stale, it doesn't have all of its oils still running through it, and it's just not as flavorful. So I'm a big black pepper girl, and I really firmly believe in the importance of freshly ground black pepper. So a couple of really good cranks, like, more black pepper probably than you think you should be adding. I think the recipe calls through three quarters of a teaspoon. If you would actually grind out and measure out three quarters of a teaspoon of black pepper, it's kind of a lot of black pepper. But that's kind of what makes this dressing so special, because we just added a half a cup of fat to this dressing, which means we got to get something in there to help balance all that fat. And so what's going to balance the fat is the lemon juice, which is the acid that we've added, and the black pepper, which is going to provide heat to cut through all of it. Okay, so whisking. And then a quarter cup of grated parmesan cheese, which is uh, one ounce of it. So if you have a scale, it's always good to use a scale for grated parm, because every cheese grater grates cheese differently, and what a microplane would grate one cup, and one cups worth of microplaned grated parmesan cheese will weigh nothing compared to one cup's worth of cheese that's been grated on a box grater, or cheese that's been grated and blend--blitzed up in a food processor. So really important to think about weights when it comes to cheeses because they can vary so much.
Okay. And then the last thing here is just to add a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce to the dressing. And that's more anchovy flavor, it's more umami, it's more of that just kind of like, classic caesar steakhouse vibe flavor. And then the most important part of this dressing and of this recipe in general is tasting it. So everybody grab a spoon, go over to your bowl of dressing, and take a small spoonful of it. Taste it. What does it need? Mine needs more lemon juice. I'm adding more lemon juice to it now. We still have another half of a lemon that we're going to add into our salad later when we start adding the romaine. But I can tell that it's like, a little bit flat. So I'm adding a little more, and I'm also going to add more black pepper right now. So tweak and adjust as you see fit.
Alrighty. So this would be a good time to check on our croutons. They've been in the oven for like 10 minutes or so in my kitchen. I'm gonna go check on them, give them a toss and a stir on the baking sheet, and we'll take a quick break and I'll meet you back here once the croutons are done.
Molly: My crouts are out of the oven and they're golden brown and very crisp. You can hear it when I crunch down on them. (crunching sounds) They look perfect. So I've turned the oven off, and I'm gonna let those just sit, um, and cool down while we assemble the salad. So you'll need your four romaine hearts, or little gems or whatever other lettuce you may be using for this recipe. And grab your chef's knife. Um, and you'll just want to trim off the end of the romaine hearts, those sort of like brown bits at the end. And then you can separate the leaves, and--this is totally up to you. You can either cut crosswise, um, and cut these romaine hearts into like three inch sort of large pieces. Or what I like to do is just tear them, um, with my hands, because I kind of like the look of that better than a perfectly square cut piece of romaine. So tear them, and if your romaine is not pre-washed, this would be a good time to wash your lettuces. And you're just, um, either adding them straight to the bowl or to your salad spinner as you tear. (tearing sounds).
Okay. So all of the romaine hearts are in the bowl, and now we're gonna do a little thing that I call pre-dressing, which is when you dress the leaves of the lettuces that you're using in your salad with a little bit of lemon and olive oil before you add the caesar dressing. And that just ensures that every little sort of nook and cranny of each leaf is--has a little bit of acidity and a little bit of oil on it, and, um, is properly dressed, and it just kind of brings the whole thing alive, versus just throwing romaine right into the dressing. Um, so take that remaining half of your lemon and squeeze it all over the romaine. And then also season the lettuces with salt. I think a lot of people think that--that you don't need to season lettuce because there's seasoning in the dressing, and while that's true, we've properly seasoned the dressing, but now we're adding a pound or so of greens to the dressing, which means we're throwing off that seasoning by introducing all of this water-logged vegetable to it. And so you've got to season the romaine just as much as you have to season the croutons, and just as much as you have to season the dressing. So pre-seasoning your romaine is adding a little lemon, adding a little bit of salt, and then just working it together in the bowl with the dressing with your fingers without really scooping up any of the caesar that's underneath. You're just making sure you get a little bit of acidity on there before we toss.
And then this is a great time now to add your croutons, and just kind of sprinkle those over. I like my croutons to go into the salad before it gets dressed because that way the croutons pick up some of the dressing also. And that's another reason why we make croutons with all these nooks and crannies, is that now there's little holes and crevices for the caesar dressing to cling to. So once your croutons are in there, you can either use your hands or if that grosses you out, use tongs, and massage that caesar dressing into the romaine gently. Because this is lettuce, and we need to care for it, um, and treat it tenderly, because we don't want to bruise it and break it down, and we want this not to feel heavy and wilted, um, and beat up, so treat it with respect. Um, and just make sure all those leaves get nicely coated. And then this is a moment for another taste test. (crunching sounds Mine tastes delicious. I'm gonna go ahead and add even a little bit more lemon juice and then I'm just gonna add about another ounce of grated parm right into the salad and toss it in. And the reason that we separate the parm into two additions, where it's going into the dressing first and then onto the leaves later, is that the parm in the dressing kind of dissolves and disappears, um, and becomes one with the dressing. But if you add more parm once the dressing has been, um, tossed with the romaine leaves, then you get these clingy bits of cheese that are clinging to the dressing that's clinging to the leaves and it looks really nice and you get little pops of parm, and so it's the double parm treatment. Taste and adjust for seasoning. Maybe it needs a little more black pepper, maybe it needs a little more salt, and that's it.
Molly: Mmm! So delicious. A classic and iconic salad. Thanks so much for being here. Um, I hope that you guys enjoy your caesar salads. Feel free to tag me on Instagram if you end up making them and want to show them your photos. Leave your comments in a review here on the podcast, and thank you for being here and I hope to cook with you again someday soon.