No chicken & tomatoes: how to make an authentic caesar salad

Caesar salad is perhaps one of the best off-season dishes that you can order in a restaurant in winter and take with you to a picnic in summer. There are a lot of variations of this salad: you can make it with a chicken fillet, some salmon, crab meat, or tender roasted veal.

By the way, this salad was named after the chef who ran a restaurant on the American border with Mexico. You will be surprised, but a mix of ingredients that can be harmoniously combined with each other is simply the result of a chef’s ability to prepare a dish from what was in the fridge. According to legend, the classic recipe combined lettuce, croutons, cheese and a spicy dressing. Sometimes experiments are successful. Now this salad is known all over the world.

4 tips for cooking caesar salad:

1. Caesar salad can be cooked when you’re at a picnic or camping out in the wild, the trick is to make a dressing in advance. The chicken fillet and croutons can be grilled anywhere.
2. Caesar croutons can be cooked in a pan or in the oven. For example, I always have garlic olive oil in my kitchen: it’s just olive oil, to which I added 4 cloves of garlic and left it to infuse. It can be poured over the croutons before they are sent to the oven.
3. The original Caesar recipe uses Worcester sauce, but it can be replaced with balsamic vinegar or even apple cider vinegar.
4. For Caesar salad, it is best to take romaine lettuce, as it has strong meaty leaves, and its nutty taste is very harmonious in this dish. However, you can experiment using, for example, iceberg lettuce – in this case, the salad will taste more delicate. You can even add some arugula. And here’s a tip: if your lettuce leaves have been in the refrigerator for a couple of days, you can soak them in water for a couple of hours so that they become firm and crisp again.