MY CHICKEN CAESAR SALAD

It took me this long to learn that traditional Caesar salads do not come with chicken. Did you know this?

I feel like this is something that happened behind my back, because every memory or recollection I have of a Caesar salad is that of chicken.

What’s that theory where large groups of people believe something happened when it didn’t, is it the Mandela Effect? Is that what happened with chicken in Caesar salads having chicken breast? Or is it just me?

So basically, I learned recently that a Caesar salad, as it was meant to be enjoyed authentically, is just leaves, stale bread, and a dressing. Fabulous though that is, because the dressing really is fantastic and the stale bread *ahem* croutons, are secretly my favorite bit, I just cannot unlearn what I know to be a Caesar salad at it’s most enjoyable, which for me, must include chicken.

That is why I added ‘CHICKEN’ to the title of this recipe, because I wanted to be clear from the jump where we’re at with this… I guess now ‘non-traditional’ take on a Caesar salad.

Purists don’t come for me, I don’t have the strength. I put ‘MY’ in the title, just for early expectation managing, not because I have taken a few other (fairly minor IMO) liberties, but I also have some big opinions on making and arranging this salad, which I will address below while I rifle through some thoughts on method and ingredients.

MY OPINIONS

• The Croutons – the bread has to be good in architecture (nothing too flimsy), it has to be stale, and it has to be cooked in chicken fat. I’m sorry, there’s no other way to address it. The bread also must be torn by hand. I don’t want to see neatly cubed pieces of bread anywhere near this. I would recommend tearing the bread – again, by hand – into little bitesize morsels (a mix of forksize bites and also biggish crumbs for texture in the salad) the night before you want to eat and leave them out on a chopping board or in a roasting tray, covered with a clean tea towel, to stale and dry out as much as possible.
• The Dressing – eggy, mustardy, lemony, and garlicky as all hell. Two oils – olive and rapeseed – because I need the dressing to not be too olivey, and the rapeseed adds a gorgeous yellow hue to the dressing, plus adds to the nuttiness of the mustard. Worcestershire sauce, always, but shockingly… no anchovies. Not in the dressing anyway, because I want the anchovies to have their own unique role in the situation. Which brings me to…
• The Anchovies – do I prefer the fresh, witch silver, bougie anchovies from the fish counter in a supermarket? Absolutely. Do I often have them in the fridge? No. So will a peel-back tin of anchovies from the pantry do? Yes, they absolutely will, and I want all of them. But as mentioned, I want them in the salad as their own character, not in the dressing as a B-plot. Also, sorry, in my opinion, there are no substitutes for these. Removing these in my opinion is as egregious as removing the croutons. Leave them out if you absolutely must, but it won’t taste anything like the below.
• The Leaves – Romaine, baby. Baby gem if you’re struggling (as did I once, as seen in the image below). Romaine is bland, I know, but the beauty here is that it gives crunch and a generous vehicle to deliver all the other amalgamated flavors together. It’s a very polite leaf. I also want the leaves chopped as little as possible. Not as in chopped to BE as little as possible, I mean don’t chop them if you don’t have to. I want big, palm leaf style beds of leaves in my salad. Chop if you think you must fit them on the plate, of course, but I want big, leafy boats of the stuff.
• The Untraditional Chicken – my Mandela Effect memories have always shown me a Caesar salad served with a dry, pale, sliced chicken breast. Maybe it’s been griddled to have some tiger stripes, just for mercy’s sake. Not for me. Not in this, or anything else, for that matter. I want bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs that have been roasted simply in salt and pepper, cooled, and torn apart by hand. Skin in the salad too. The chicken fat the roast produces will be used to cook the croutons.
• The Assembly – dress the leaves (and only the leaves) together in a bowl, then layer the salad on the plates, adding more dressing at the end. You don’t want the whole thing sopping and soggy – the best bit of a Caesar salad is the textural crunch.
• The Parmesan – always. I feel like this is the one thing we all unanimously agree on.

Are we happy with the above? Almost? Good enough for me.

Let’s get going.

Serves 2

For the chicken

4 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs

1 tbs olive oil

For the croutons

2 tbs chicken fat (from roasting the chicken)

2 slices of good, stale and sturdy bread like a sourdough (see intro)

For the dressing

1 egg yolk

1 tsp Dijon mustard

2 cloves garlic – finely grated

Juice of ½ lemon

1 tsp Worcestershire sauce

40ml olive oil

20ml rapeseed oil

2 tbs Parmesan cheese – finely grated

For the salad

1 large romaine lettuce 

1 can anchovies (drained and chopped)

More Parmesan to serve

1. As does so many wonderful things in life, you start with chicken. Preheat your oven to 200°C, and place your chicken thighs on a roasting tray with tall-ish sides (to catch the fat). 
2. Drizzle them with the olive oil, cover with lots of salt and pepper and then add more pepper because you will enjoy it. Slip into the warm oven to cook for 45 – 50 minutes until the chicken is cooked through and crunchily, golden-skinned.
3. Remove the chicken to a bowl which you can cover with foil and allow to cool, and then pour 2 tbs of the chicken fat into a large frying pan or skillet and put this on a medium heat on the hob. Note – if you have a metal tray with high sides, roast your chicken in this and then just put the tray on the hob straight away once the chicken has been taken out and don’t bother with the extra frying pan.
4. Assuming you’ve done as I’ve said in the intro and staled up your bread chunks beforehand, add the bread to the pan of chicken fat and fry them for roughly 8 – 10 minutes, turning regularly to make sure they are evenly coated until they are bronzed and crunchy. Remove them to a plate and allow to cool.
5. While the croutons and chicken cool, make the dressing. In a large bowl, whisk together the egg yolk, mustard, garlic, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce to create a vibrant, golden yellow emulsion.
6. Combine both olive oil and rapeseed oil in a jug, or my preferred way, in a clean, empty, squeeze bottle (like you’d see ketchup on the side of a burger van) which also helps with the next step.
7. Slowly, drip by slow, slow drip, add the oil into the eggy, mustard mixture, whisking constantly. Don’t add any oil until you have thoroughly whisked the last oil addition. It won’t split, so don’t panic, but the slow dripping just makes the emulsification so much easier. Keep going until the dressing has absorbed all the oil – we’re not going for a thick, mayonnaise thing here, we want a thin but creamy, clean looking, pourable dressing. Now add a little salt (no pepper for me, as I want to dress the salad itself with an abundance of pepper later), stir in the Parmesan, and taste for seasoning. You may want a little more lemon juice, but know that any further liquid added may slightly change the viscosity.
8. Spoon a little of the dressing – a tablespoon at most – into a large bowl (that will fit all of your salad leaves) and start tearing your leaves. I like to simply rip the whole leaf from its stem, trim the very end (the bottom centimetre) and then add to the bowl. No chopping of the actual leaf for me, but do what you must.
9. Once all your leaves are in the bowl, gently toss them in the dressing at the bottom of the bowl. I use my hands, and make sure each leaf is very gently coated. Bonus points if you can see a thin layer of dressing pool in the domed crevice of the leaf. Don’t overdress though, you only want the leaves touched by the dressing, not coated. More dressing will go on later.
10. Now for the assembly, it’s do as you want, but as you can see, I don’t like putting everything in a bowl, tossing it, and then spooning it on plates. I like assembling it more carefully – not prissily so – but just in a manner that allows each element to not be dragged into the uniform tastes.
11. So I pile some of the lightly dressed leaves on a big plate, and then I tuck some of croutons in and around the leaves. Then, using my hands, I strip the chicken thigh meat from the bone, tucking the meat morsels into little nooks and crannies in the leaves. I then sprinkle over the drained and chopped anchovies, almost as if they were seasonings themselves. Then finally, I pepper the living daylights out of the plate, spoon over a little more of the dressing so that the chicken and crouton chunks are politely anointed, before finally grating over lashings of fresh Parmesan.