| Hail
Caesar
Making a Caesar salad is easy, right?
Then how come it’s so hard to find a good one?
By Jody Jaffe
Who knew Caesar salad could be so easy to mess
up? After all, it’s pretty basic stuff: lettuce, garlic,
Parmesan, egg, oil, lemon AND the dreaded anchovy.
But try tasting eight of them. After the fourth bad
one, you’ll swear you hear Caesar Cardini—the
Tijuana restaurateur who’s credited with inventing the
salad 80 years ago—banging his head against his coffin.
And when you do get a good one, you’ll understand Janis
McLean’s evangelical zeal. “I have some very strong
opinions about Caesar salad,” McLean warned us as she
showed us to a table at the redDog
Café in Silver Spring, where she’s the chef.
I was there with my two official tasters, Lydia Schlosser
and Susan Watterson. Schlosser
is the former pastry chef at the old Café Bethesda.
She’s now the registrar at L’Academie
de Cuisine in Bethesda. Watterson
is a savory chef who teaches at L’Academie.
She’s also the former chef at Café Bethesda. They’ve
been friends for years.
We were on a mission to find a good Caesar salad, a
seemingly easy task. You’d think it would be even easier
than finding a good crème brûlée,
our last mission. (To read the story “Crème Bru-ology
from the May/June Bethesda Magazine, go to www.bethesdamagazine.com
and click on “Story Archive.”) Brûlées require cooking, baking and torching; Caesar salads
require only tossing.
But the variation of Caesars we sampled at area restaurants
was astounding. One high-priced steakhouse served what
looked to be an attractive one. The lettuce was cut
to the right size, there were no telltale brown edges
on the leaves indicating it had sat around too long,
the dressing gracefully coated instead of clumsily clumped,
the croutons looked homemade and, for the nicest touch
of all, the Parmesan came shaved in paper-thin shards.
Then Schlosser and Watterson
took a forkful of greens. Watterson
curled her lip. “This is the ghost of Caesar,” Watterson
pronounced. “You could eat a whole plate before you
realized it.”
I picked up a flake of the shaved cheese and popped
it in my mouth. There was no discernible taste of anything.
A complete waste of calories.
“Must be umbrella handles,” Watterson
said. Earlier, she’d told a story about an Italian guy
who was arrested for selling grated umbrella handles
as Parmesan cheese. “At least it’s not fishy,” Schlosser
said.
True. We’d just come from another restaurant where
two bites of the salad had us chasing it with water.
“Whew!” Watterson rolled her eyes after the first bite. Then she fanned
her mouth and feigned an Irish accent, “A whiff of the
[fish] tank there.” Schlosser took a bite and rolled
her eyes, too.
Wimps. What’s a Caesar without the assertive blast
from the sea? I adore anchovies and can eat a whole
can by myself. So I took a bite, expecting to love it.
Even I rolled my eyes. And if something’s too fishy
for me, they’ve got a real problem with their Caesar
dressing.
Anchovies are the trickiest part of the Caesar salad.
Too much and you have the whiff-of-the-tank problem;
too little and you’re saddled with Caesar’s ghost.
Which brings us back to the redDog
Café and Chef Janis McLean’s impassioned view of the
proper Caesar salad.
“Look,” she says emphatically, jabbing her finger at
the menu, “the title is Classic Caesar. That means,
‘No, you cannot have it without anchovies.’ They’re
in the dressing. You go into some of the chains and
there’s not an anchovy in sight. Their Caesars are just
an excuse to dump a lot of Parmesan. Like I say, I have
some definite opinions on the matter.”
McLean was also animated about the proper cheese (a
Parmesan-Reggiano mix), which
lead to her spirited discourse on oil (she uses a virgin
olive/canola mix), which lead to the controversy over
egg yolks. “You have to use them,” she says, as firm
as an airport security guard.
But what about salmonella?
“Pasteurized egg yolks, I’ll show you,” McLean says,
ducking behind a counter to find the carton.
Watterson, who was a teaching
assistant when McLean went through L’Academie’s
cooking program, was grinning. “I forgot to mention,
she’s very enthusiastic.”
Sure enough, egg yolks come pasteurized in small milk
cartons. “But it’s only available to restaurants,” McLean
says.
Schlosser still makes her Caesar salad the pre-pasteurized
way, with regular egg yolks. “I’m 49 years old,” she
says, “I’ve been eating raw eggs my whole life and I’m
not dead. I worry more about the drivers on Rockville
Pike running into my kids than I do about raw eggs.”
redDog was our first stop
on the Caesar salad taste test. It’s a sleek, hip place
with an industrial feel. High ceilings, lots of windows,
slate floors, splashes of red and interesting art on
the walls. Our first Caesar arrived and we were starting
on a high note.
“The lettuce looks good, not rusty,” Schlosser says.
Caesar salad is now known as a chopped salad, though
it started out as finger food.
Cardini, the Tijuana restaurateur,
first served his famous Caesar with the flat, broad
spears of the Romaine lettuce arranged whole in a circle
on a dinner plate. The idea was to pick up the spears
and eat them. Legend has it that Wallis Warfield
Simpson—the Duchess of Windsor—frequented Cardini’s
restaurant on her trysts with the would-be king. Supposedly,
she loved the salad, but not its presentation. Being
a proper lady, she cut the spears with a knife and fork,
and the rest is culinary history.
Now the greens are always chopped into manageable pieces.
However, manageable is subjective and varied considerably
among the restaurants we tried, with several serving
giant, ungainly pieces.
“Manly sized bites for a manly restaurant,” Watterson
says of a steakhouse’s offerings.
The other problem with cutting greens is in the timing.
If they’re chopped too early in the day (or the day
before), the lettuce oxidizes from the metal of the
knife, turning the leaves orangey-brown at the edges.
“I’m sure we’ll see a rusty one sooner or later,” Watterson
predicts.
The nature of the lettuce determines the salad dressing;
hence, the creamy Caesar dressing for the broad, flat
leaves of Romaine. “This sticks to the leaves,” Watterson
says. She stirred her fork through the salad, illustrating
how the dressing clung to the flat leaves. “A balsamic
vinegar dressing would just kind of bead up and roll
off—it’s designed for curly lettuce.”
Did someone say vinegar? McLean, who’d just put away
the carton of pasteurized egg yolks, started lining
up all the different vinegars she uses. As she scooted
around the counter to get the fifth and final vinegar
(champagne), Watterson laughed.
“I told you she was enthusiastic.”
redDog’s Caesar is served
on a simple white plate. Like the chef says, classic
Caesar. The croutons were irregularly shaped, which
Schlosser liked. “They don’t look like they came out
of a box.”
Next came the test taste.
“It’s tangy,” says Watterson. She rubbed the lettuce with her tongue and wrinkled
her nose. “But I don’t like the extra virgin (olive
oil). I can taste it.”
“It’s lemony and crisp,” Schlosser says. “If I sat
down in a restaurant and ordered it, I’d be happy. The
balance is good, maybe a little heavy on the acid.”
This salad gets my vote for best of the lot. While
I didn’t know much about crème brûlée
before I tasted it, I do know Caesars. I used to prepare
them tableside at a posh restaurant in Poughkeepsie,
N.Y., where I was moonlighting as a waitress to augment
my newspaper salary.
redDog’s Caesar is a robust,
aggressive salad with a strong citrus kick. If you like
your Caesars edgy and opinionated, this is the place
to go.
Our next stop was the elegant Cesco
in Bethesda. The crowd was older, more traditional than
the clientele at redDog. And the restaurant’s Caesar salad reflected it.
“This is for someone who wants an understated, safe
Caesar salad,” Watterson says,
after sampling the creamy coated leaves. “People at
a place like this don’t want to walk away with garlic
on their breath.”
We’d asked the waiter what kind of oil the chef uses
in the dressing. “They’ll all tell you they only use
extra virgin, because they think it sounds better,”
Watterson says. And indeed,
that’s what every waiter told us. Watterson
laughed when the Cesco waiter
reported back.
“They don’t use straight olive oil here,” she says,
“because this salad tastes good to me.”
At Thyme Square Café in Bethesda, we found a Caesar
that all three of us liked. (Plus the restaurant’s got
one of the best bread baskets around.) Everything worked
in this salad. The leaves were crisp and cut to manageable
bites. The croutons tasted homemade, the dressing was
a balanced blend of garlic, lemon, Parmesan, anchovies
and oil (here, too, we were told it was straight olive
oil). And best of all, from my perspective, it was served
with a crisscross of fresh—not canned—anchovies. That’s
like the difference between fresh and canned peaches.
The best crouton award would have to go to the Irish
pub, RiRa. “At my house, these
wouldn’t last,” Schlosser says of the Parmesan-crunchy
bites of toasted bread. “These are the kind of croutons
we eat without the salad.”
And for the most unusual Caesar salad, Bethesda’s recently
opened restaurant, the Old Homestead, wins easily. First
we sampled the steakhouse’s traditional Caesar. This
was where the leaves came big and the croutons came
bigger.
“This is for big guys, smoking big cigars,” Watterson says. “But I’d be happy if I was served this. It’s
a pleasant, unassuming Caesar salad and that’s what
steakhouses are known for. This is the kind of place
[where] business people spend gobs of money, taking
people out for meals. You want to have something that
everybody’s comfortable with.”
Meaning easy on the garlic and anchovies.
For the more adventuresome, Old Homestead offers a
grilled Caesar with prawns.
When it arrived at our table, we were all surprised.
This salad hearkens back to its beginnings, served the
Cardini way, in spears, drizzled
with dressing. Except the dressing had a strong jolt
of chipotle and the lettuce
was charred.
This was the hit of all our tastings.
It was hot and cool at the same time, and the smoky
flavor gave the salad a hefty, meaty taste.
“Why didn’t you think of this when you were at Café
Bethesda?” says Schlosser, the former pastry chef at
the recently closed restaurant.
“I wish I had,” Watterson says. “I’ve let the world down. Maybe Café Bethesda
would still be open.”
Schlosser, now the registrar at L’Academie
de Cuisine, laughs. “And I’d have a job not answering
phones.”
Susan and Lydia’s
Favorite Caesars
Thyme Square Café
4735 Bethesda Ave., Bethesda.
The most well-balanced dressing of all we sampled. Fresh
anchovies.
Old Homestead Steakhouse
7501 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda.
Charred lettuce gives this salad a smoky, meaty
flavor, making it a delicious and interesting update
to the classic Caesar.
redDog Café
8301-A Grubb St., Silver Spring.
Assertive dressing with strong citrus kick.
Cesco
4871 Cordell Ave., Bethesda.
Quiet flavor (no garlic breath) and creamy dressing.
RiRa Irish Pub
4931 Elm St., Bethesda.
Can’t-eat-just-one Parmesan croutons.
Old Homestead Steakhouse’s
Chili Prawn Caesar Salad (serves 2)
Ingredients:
10 large prawns or shrimp, peeled and deveined
(size and amount can vary)
For the marinade:
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
- 1/2 red pepper
- 2 tablespoons chopped garlic
- 2 tablespoons chili powder
- 2 tablespoons lemon juice
- 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon pepper
Combine in a food processor and pour over prawns. Let
stand at least three hours in the refrigerator.
For the garnish:
- 1/2 cup freshly grated
- Parmesan cheese
- 1/4 cup panko bread crumbs
Combine and place in four small piles. Bake at 350
degrees until just golden.
For the dressing:
- 2 egg yolks
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
- 2 anchovy fillets
- 1 tablespoon chopped garlic
- 3 tablespoons grated
- Parmesan cheese
- 1 chipotle pepper
- 1 teaspoon chopped cilantro
Combine in food processor and let stand.
To compose the salads:
After all items are prepped, prepare grill and assemble
the following ingredients to prepare the salads:
- 2 whole heads of Romaine
- 3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- salt and pepper
1. Split the Romaine down the middle and brush with
olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
2. Place on grill and char lightly. Remove and place
on plates.
3. Grill prawns until just done, remove, and place
on top of Romaine.
4. Pour dressing over shrimp and lettuce, garnish with
Parmesan crisp and grated Parmesan cheese. Finish with
a split lemon.
- Created by Chef Rob Fleming, Old
Homestead Steakhouse
Jody Jaffe is the author of the upcoming Sins
of the Sire, the fourth book in the Nattie
Gold mystery series.
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