Nancy Silverton’s Chopped Salad | Genius Recipes

This week on “Genius Recipes,” Kristen’s sharing the secret tricks that make Chef Nancy Silverton’s chopped salad so iconic. Is it the powerhouse dressing? Its versatility? Yes and yes—plus a few extra touches that make this salad sing. GET THE RECIPE ►► https://f52.co/32HDXmW

INGREDIENTS
For the vinaigrette:
2 1/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons dried oregano
Freshly squeezed juice from 1/2 lemon (1 tablespoon), or more to taste
2 medium cloves garlic, 1 smashed flat and 1 grated
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste
1 1/2 cups extra-virgin olive oil

For the salad:
1/2 small red onion, cut in half from top to bottom
1 head (22 ounces) iceberg lettuce
1 head (11 ounces) radicchio
1 pint small, sweet cherry tomatoes, such as Sun Golds or Sweet 100s, cut into quarters
Kosher salt
1 1/2 cups no-salt-added chickpeas, drained
1/4 pound aged provolone, cut into 1/8-inch-thick slices, then cut into 1/4-inch-wide strips
1/4 pound Genoa salami, cut into 1/8-inch-thick slices, then cut into 1/4-inch-wide strips
5 pepperoncini (stems discarded), cut into thin slices (about 1/4 cup)
Freshly squeezed juice from 1/2 lemon (1 tablespoon), or more to taste
Dried oregano (preferably Sicilian oregano on the branch), for sprinkling

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This is the thing about chop salads they are a really really good thing to make when you have a friend or partner or child you can put to work because there’s a lot of chopping or if you’re someone who just loves chopping stuff and it really like relaxes you maybe

Come make it for me This recipe for chopped salad comes from nancy silverton who is the chef at pizzeria matzah and has been working on her chop salad since the 1970s so the dressing is very important it starts with a couple different forms of garlic clove So to those two kinds of garlic i’m gonna add a whole bunch of dried oregano It’s what in this recipe makes all of these other ingredients kind of like dance around it some red wine vinegar and lemon And salt and pepper So this is the base it gets stirred together and marinates the oregano for about five minutes and then the olive oil goes in so nancy also has kind of an interesting way that she slices the vegetables for this chopped salad which is also a very important component of a chopped salad

The textures that you get so we’ll start with the onion nancy has you separate all the different layers and stack them up so that you can slice them evenly okay so take these layers that was an amazing noise slice them eighth of an inch thickish oh 1 16 actually so

Is that your ruler i was breathing that whole time ah what do you think of my knife skills not too bad raw onion is not my favorite thing it can be very pungent it can give you kind of that like bummer aftertaste after a while but if you soak it in ice water

It washes away all of that it makes it taste like sweet and fresh without any of that kind of icky aftertaste next up is this radicchio which has a great like slightly bitter taste to offset the sweet iceberg that’s in there Here’s another clever little thing that nancy does she salts the tomatoes on their own to become more tomatoey as they sit so now that the oregano has marinated with everything i’m going to slowly whisk in the olive oil this is where you emulsify the vinaigrette where you pour in the olive

Oil in a thin stream into the vinegary base and instead of being separate vinegar and oil that kind of like doesn’t like to mix it will in theory become one i happen to not be very concerned about proper emulsification myself i just think that it’s gonna taste good on the

Salad when it gets there anyways but it’s nice if it kind of can can thicken it up and make it a little bit more luscious in texture this is one of those genius recipes that people have been sending me over and over through the years and i always had to wonder why

What is it that makes this salad so special why is it that every blogger’s written about it and nancy ended up making it for a national salad chain the last person who sent this to me was a longtime food 52 community member named tom hirschfeld and i asked him

Why why tom why do you think this is such a genius salad and he also added that it’s extremely versatile he uses this as a base to pull out whatever he wants from his fridge and then on top of that he said it holds really well so this is the moment we’ve

All been waiting for all the stuff goes in the bowl and becomes the chopped salad so already in here is the iceberg lettuce and the radicchio that have been shredded finely we’ve got matchsticks of genoa salami more matchsticks of aged provolone chickpeas those pre-salted tomatoes a few pepperonis thinly sliced my

Soaked and ice water onion i probably should drain this in a separate thing but i’m not going to she also has you squeeze over a little bit more lemon and then that oregano vinaigrette oh man i can’t wait to share this salad with my off-camera friends because there’s a lot of salad here

Nancy says to plate it like a mountain i’m doing my best there’s something familiar about it with the oregano and the garlic and the red wine vinegar but everything is just taken to a new extreme so i was going in here hunting for the perfect bite and i realized that

No one bite is going to be the perfect bite there’s so much good stuff going on in here so you might get one bite with a lot of spice at one point with a lot of salt one bite with a lot of like percy acid and it will keep building on itself making

Each bite even more perfect than the last For more genius recipes like this to add to your collection of the most famous recipes of all time be sure to like this video and subscribe to our channel and check back next week you