2-4: Chef’s Salad is another somewhat classic American restaurant dish to serve with your 1-18: Club Sandwich. Wikipedia gives it a similar history–most accounts trace it back to early 20th century New York, although a few credit it to originating in 17th century England. This iteration is pretty similar to most you’ll find in modern-day restaurants–the beauty of the chef salad is that the ingredients are at the discretion of the chef.
I NEED that creepy statue in the Simply Delicious picture. Google has nothing decent for me when I search “hippopotamus chef“, but you never know–someday one of my thrift store treasure hunt trips may pay off.
Similar to a Cobb salad, although the chef salad usually leaves the pieces of meat larger, and doesn’t include avocado. I made SO MANY Cobb salads during my restaurant tenure, and this recipe gave me the itch to practice those old garde manger skills.
Ingredients. I used a 50/50 salad mix for my lettuce and chicken, turkey, & ham instead of just one or the other.
I cooked off a batch of marinated chicken breasts in the oven, since I had a bunch of recipes I had pulled that used cooked chicken.
I did the garlic rub, although I NEVER did that when working in restaurants, and I’m not quite sure where they got that technique from.
Here’s something I used to do a ton on the line–julienne radishes. We used them for our Cobb salad as well as topping for our pork tacos, and I’d do entire bags of radishes this way. I cut up all the other stuff too, but it honestly wasn’t interesting enough to take pictures of each component.
Mixed up the “dressing”–there wasn’t much to it, but there’s SO much other stuff in the salad, it’s not as lacking as you would think.
Final dish–I plated it like a Cobb, because I can’t help myself. At least it’s pretty.
Grade: A
