Caesar Salad | Cooking Italian with Joe

it's the good life full of fun hey guys welcome to my kitchen another exciting day in joe's kitchen always an exciting day joe's kitchen today we're gonna make caesar salad i've got a great recipe i just made it yesterday for one of the kids functions absolutely delicious um i love caesar salad it's clean it's crisp it's tangy it's sweet it's salty it's got pepper it's got that edge to it which is delicious and one of the most important ingredients on a caesar salad is the croutons so i'm going to show you how to make the most delicious garlic salt pepper croutons you'll ever have so this is going to be a delicious recipe i'll show you exactly how to put together it's simple it's fun goes relatively quickly so just follow along and have some fun and just get ready to have a great caesar salad so a quick background caesar salad actually caesar salad wasn't served to caesar it was actually originated in the 1920s at a restaurant caesars so that's where caesar salad came from and the original recipe of caesar salad never had um anchovies in it so i'm not gonna use anchovies you could certainly use anchovies uh in any of your recipes and and certainly tweak it any way you like and if you like a little bit more of this and a little bit less of that that's totally fine but i'm gonna show you exactly how i make it and what makes it absolutely delicious in our family okay so moving forward let's talk about croutons i've got one long baguette of french bread okay so i chopped this up and a size recruit so your croutons want to be cut into a bite size okay so here's one little piece that i have left over so just to kind of show you here what you know i'm going to cut it something that size in half you can always quarter it okay so you want to put them in about that size and then i've got a quarter cup of butter melted butter quarter cup of olive oil so i took three cloves of garlic and i made garlic paste but i'll show you exactly how to make that when i make the caesar salad and i've got one tablespoon of sea salt my gray sea salt that i crushed and then i've got one tablespoon of freshly ground black pepper which i just did okay so what i want to do for you is i want to make the croutons first and i'm going to toast those it'll take anywhere from 10 minutes to 15 minutes so preheat your oven to about 400 degrees and then we'll make that first while that's cooking and how you're going to make sure that you never make a mistake make sure you get your timer i'm going to put it right in front of us so we don't we don't burn the croutons because they're critical they're crucial okay so we're going to get that going and while that's going we're going to make the caesar salad so let me kind of transition my cooking surface here with magic and i'll tune right back with you guys we'll show you how to make those croutons isn't that cool the magic okay so what i wanted to share with you is a little little trick i do on making a garlic paste so you can use a mincer and so forth but this is really quick and easy you're gonna take a clove of garlic take your knife give it a whack right and we're gonna open up oh do you guys love garlic i love it smells phenomenal okay so there's our garlic i'm going to cut that little stem area off right because that's kind of coarse you don't want to get bitten into that okay and then what you're going to do is you're just going to take it and slice it now a lot of people ask me you know the best way to slice make sure a your knife is sharp and two you don't just push the knife down you got to draw the knife through and then see you're actually slicing it you're keeping the nose of the knife on the board and that way it just gives you the control if not you're going to lose control okay so now what i've got is i've got some thinly sliced garlic okay put it in a pile this is a little trick from grandma borea okay nonabori okay so i'm gonna put it up on now i'm gonna get a pounder now i'm gonna get a piece of saran okay you want to have it a good size because you want it to kind of seal around the outside okay so this is how i did all that okay because i took six cloves of girl okay now what you do is you get a thought in your head of somebody that really ticks you off that you don't like okay now i'm a very kind loving person so it's difficult for me to think of somebody but in any case i think i have somebody in mind all right so i'm just kidding so okay so now i'm going to take this and then you're just going to kind of tap it to get it going all right and what's going to happen now is you're going to see the fiber of the garlic you want to break that down so i'm going to whack it a little bit here okay and then as you see as you're pounding you're going to see some of it just melts away and then there's going to be other bits where there's a fiber okay you can make a little sound with it go a little bit with the frank sinatra music okay now i'm going to pull that across okay and now it just looks like a puddle of mush right then you take your cute little spatula here and you just draw it across okay and there you go there's your garlic paste oh that smells good i'm gonna tell you you put that on your mouth and unless you're hanging with somebody else that put the same amount in their mouth you're not going to have any friends that day i'm just going to tell you straight up okay so i'm going to pop that in there and you know it's no wonder dracula's not coming around you know what i'm saying because that is seriously that is that's like nuclear garlic okay so good stuff so we're gonna pop that right in so that's how you make garlic paste it's easy it's quick it's fast it's fun a little grandma caroline for you all right so now i've got my croutons which i show you that you want to cut you know so you want to make sure you got a mouth mouth bite okay i've got my melted butter right and i've got my olive oil so a quarter cup of each and you're going to marry those together okay and now what we're going to do is we're going to take our garlic right we're going to put it right in there oh my god look at that there's a lot of garlic there okay so that's good and i have some people you know that they'll message me and say um you know can i cut back anything you guys can use whatever you want so if you want a little less by all means sometimes i think you know with our recipes if um if at the very least if you don't like the recipe directly but it gives you the inspiration to do something in the kitchen and have some fun then i think uh my time has been well served here with you so all right so now what i'm doing is i'm just going to mix that up you want to make sure that the garlic's not clumping in there okay because you don't want to have a huge clump and i'm going to use much of the pepper i'm going to save a little bit for when it comes out of the oven okay so i'm going to put most of the pepper in there same thing with the salt i'm gonna leave a little bit just to finish it off okay so now i've got that beautiful salt butter oh my god that smells absolutely awesome now i've got my to be awesome croutons right they're all in here right so what i do is i just make sure i get a great stir okay just keep stirring it and then you're gonna take a nice serving spoon and you're just gonna drizzle this over the top of the croutons right and then stir it up i'm telling you if you ever have a caesar salad the critical part of the caesar salad are those croutons so delicious delicious delicious and then same thing here i'm going to get see what will happen is that garlic will want to come to the bottom right and don't worry about the garlic because the garlic is going to cook so when the garlic cooks inside i'm just finding a few that didn't get coated yet you know what i mean whoa whoa there's a little guy out there the minute i said oven and cooked you see how he jumped out of the bowl he was a little scared but the uh the garlic will cook so when the garlic cooks it'll roast so it doesn't have that sharp flavor it'll have a nice roasted garlic flavor so you're not saturating this like you would uh like a dressing right you're not really saturating you want to get a nice coat now what the oil will do i mean surely it's getting a beautiful flavor but it's going to create that you want to create a nice crisp on the outside of the crouton all right and then i'm going to take a pan right the oven like i said 400 degrees and then i'm just gonna put it right in the middle of the pan all right you're gonna have some butter garlic on the inside pan here i'll show you how to handle that in a minute but so spread it across the goal here is to get everything even and separate because you want the hot air to try to you know of the oven to try to get around each one of the croutons okay and if you don't so you know there's one right there see how that one doesn't have a lot on it so we don't want to have that bare beautiful all right so i got one there so what i'm going to do is just take a little bit of the sauce and make sure i get it coated so there we go so this is set at 400 degrees all right so i'm going to pop this in push it all the way to the back now i'm going to set this for 10. it's probably going to take about 15 minutes but i'm going to set that for 10. now i've got a little extra salt a little extra pepper i'm going to set off the side so i want to finish it with salt and pepper when it comes out okay so i'm going to put that over there now while that's cooking we're going to put together the caesar dressing it's going to be great so give me one second let me get my ingredients with the magic tv i'll be right back hey guys magic okay so now i've got a large stainless steel ball gotta whip got my eggs i'm gonna throw my eggs in all right now we're gonna take a third of a cup of quality olive oil extra virgin italian olive oil oh my god where can you get that let me think shameless plug time beat on joe's there's some oil right from the pouya region ogliari variety phenomenal phenomenal high quality the real stuff okay so certainly we're using that high quality olive oil right in our dressing so i'm going to take a third of a cup i'm going to dump that elbow right in with the eggs okay and what you're going to make here is they'll call it is look at that beautiful that's right so i got the egg yolks in there so i'm going to hit the yolks and then i'm going to i'm going to whip it you're going to emulsify it they call it multiplied okay so what i'm going to do one of the reasons i like a large pan with the whip is i can draw it up so if you guys can see that i'm going to draw this up along the side and the eggs are going to give it a silky flavor they've got that fat and it be the yolk the yolk is a beautiful rich flavor with the fat and the flavor of the egg some people have concerns on on raw eggs so a couple of things just to kind of put your mind at these number one the yolks have the lowest bacteria count of the egg okay and number two you're essentially cooking uh an egg uh not with heat but chemicals you're cooking the egg with the acid of the lemon and the acid of the of the vinegar so it's not it's not as raw as you think it is i guess all right so here we go so we're gonna we're gonna make sure that's really well emulsified which it is it's perfect okay now what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna start adding my garlic all right so we're going to add some garlic that garlic is going to thicken it up greatly and then we've got to add our parmesan cheese okay and you don't add a lot of parmesan cheese but you certainly that'll be your finishing ingredient and then here we go so we're going to just keep putting that together now what you want to do is you want to see that garlic break apart that mush that we made right break apart beautiful now as soon as that's done i'm going to take my balsamic and my lemon juice and make sure when you mix this you're adding it nice and slow okay because you don't want the egg to solidify because of the look at that beautiful all right and then what we're going to do is we're going to add our mustard okay and the mustard's got a little acid to it as well mustard is made with vinegar so so we're going to add our mustard let me try a little taste that is good i love mustard you know i love mustard on a cooney or coney oh all right so now we're just going to keep hitting this thing right when we see how nice and beautiful that is nice and golden that's gorgeous all right so now i'm going to add my salt about a teaspoon and a half a teaspoon and a half of pepper just keep whipping that puppy now before i add the cheese and i'm going to grate that fresh for you right here in a moment i want to make sure i've got this thing really well mixed i want it almost smooth and creamy so i'm going to hit it like this for a moment and then like i said what i like about this is i just you just draw it up along the side to make sure that everything's mixed well right you know what's nice about making your own dressing too you know exactly what's there there's no preservatives or artificial this or artificial at gorgeous so let me grab my parmesan cheese now we want to use the parmesan reggiano that's certainly the best quality and we're going to use about a quarter of a cup all right guys here we go so that's a microplaner you don't necessarily have to use one of these but what's nice about a microplaner is uh you know just that it gives you those microplane flakes see that so they're nice and thin now why you want to use a parmesan and why it's traditional parmesan is going to add your cream you know so it's got a high fat content and so it just finishes off the inner partly dissolved so it'll finish off the dressing just absolutely perfect like there's no other way to finish it off so and there's so many different variations of a of a caesar you know some have worcestershire like i said some will have anchovies this is something that's just been a family favorite it's delicious it's fresh so it's going to look like there's a little bit more there than there is because you know it's microplane here so it's going to give you a greater volume so we're going to use about a third of a cup and i know that just because there you go here's the skill you got how much of that can you get through without actually microplaning your finger so that was that was perfect if it starts showing red you want to stop all right so there's our third of a cup okay so i'm gonna add that right to our right to our final i'm gonna save a little bit off to the side of my parmesan reggiano okay and i'm just going to hit that with my fennel and what will happen is as you let it set in there for a few minutes or moments it'll oh it's crouton time right as you let it set there for a few moments those those really those really thin pieces of cheese everything just dissolves it's going to be absolutely delicious right so that's easy you got fresh wholesome ingredients you're mixing it okay let's check those croutons all right guys here we go we're going to pull these out that's 400 degrees so no forgiveness if you touch something and remember they're still going to cook a little oh look at that look at that oh my god that looks good okay awesome right so what i'm gonna do is just a pinch of salt over the top just gives it that you know the other salt dissolved right so this will just give it that little taste of salt when it hits your when it hits your palate and then we're going to take that last bit of pepper same thing just hold it up a little so it spreads out nice so you don't get a good clump hey guys all right so do you want to say thank you to this little puppy right here this thing i'll tell you this thing will save so many dishes it's the simplest little thing but you set it there just prevent you from forgetting i don't know how many times you're cutting into something you forgot you're like oh that'll ruin an afternoon right all right so so there's our romaine lettuce we got three heads in there just to give you a heads up as far as what this recipe will put together and you're gonna cut this i cut the end off and then you're going to cut this about anywhere from a half to three quarters of an inch and one of the things that i'll always talk about is you know you don't want to bite into something like that that's not fun to chew into so okay but everything else should fall apart so some of those cores is sweet as they are some people love them so just cut them down but you don't want to bite into some big huge you know thing that is difficult you want that whole experience in your mouth to be a happy one you know so you're just gonna cut this down so that three quarters of an inch and like i said when i put a salad together i want every bite to be as perfect as it can be i like those greens sometimes near the end see how that's getting a little ugly right so before i i always inspect everything so before i put anything in there i'll take it make sure everything's cut make sure there's no dirt or you know something that didn't get cut through and you got some massive piece any gray or brown just get rid of it because you want cell to look fresh and beautiful and sometimes these leaves will get a little bit longer right so on that outside so not to make this complicated but again you don't want to get a huge you know you get something like that coming out of your mouth when you're trying to eat a salad you know what i mean so you want it to be all uniform-sized there's our lettuce which is perfect okay now aren't these beautiful these are olive wood little mixers isn't that great right so you're just gonna toss that puppy here in the middle so i'm gonna let those croutons cool just for a moment once those croutons are the right temperature i'm gonna throw the croutons on first then i'm going to throw the dressing we're going to toss it plate it eat it it's going to be absolutely delicious i'll talk to you guys in a minute hey guys all right so these cooled so normally we taste stuff at the end but i got to taste one let's see let me just find a little little one okay that is i mean that right there is a meal to me that's absolutely delicious and what's great about that you got the crisp on the outside it's got a little softness in the inside the butter gives it that savory flavor the oil gives it that depth that complexity the olive oil you got salt and pepper and garlic the garlic's not overpowering and again when you hit it with that salt and pepper at the end you get that freshness of it not the cooked in part of it so it's just absolutely delicious so so this is great time so what i'm going to do here whoop knock my cheese over i'm going to add those right to my to my salad okay and i want to do a nice mix with our croutons just go easy because you want to break everything apart all right and my bowl is probably a touch small for this amount of lettuce we wanted to put something out nice nice here for you so all right there you go okay so perfect all right so now we got a good mix now i want to add that dressing okay so i'm going to bring my dressing over here i'm going to give it one final mix you see that you see your a great caesar should have some thickness to it you know it's not a runny thin dressing okay and all your cheese is starting to emulsify and it's starting to cream that's why i like to set it and hit it a few times and it just gives you oh my god and it's so filled with delicious flavor okay so then what i'm gonna do here i'm not gonna at all many times you know the biggest challenge on a caesar is you want a light dusting in the sound you don't want to you don't want to drench it right so i'm just gonna put a little bit of a drizzle over the salad or the lettuce if you want croutons right and then i'm gonna do a really light mix okay and then what you're looking for you're not looking to coat everything what you're looking for is uh oh that's beautiful you're looking forward to see see that it's evenly distributed throughout but you don't want it again coated with the dressing okay and like i said this bowl is probably just a touch small but we're just gonna make it work perfect okay it's going to need a little bit more i got a nice even spread just a drizzle more there you go perfect beautiful that's probably all we're going to need right there and then you're gonna mix it now remember i just hit it with a large amount but you want everything to have a little bit of the caesar so you want the croutons to have a little bit of a hit along with everything else and what i do with my last bit of inspection in here i just want to make sure there's no big clump of dressing anywhere right and there isn't it's perfect beautiful and then what i'm going to do is clean up because i think i lost a piece here or there i lost a crouton huh look at that interesting beautiful all right so now let me show you how to plate this just to make it look beautiful delicious and something to be proud of talk to you guys in a minute hey guys all right so i got a nice little plate here so what i'm gonna do is see how the the mix the the ratio there of your croutons and your lettuce oh my god it's perfect so because the crouton is a big part of the caesar right so let's do that that's a perfect portion right there i'm gonna set that aside we're gonna have a room full of people here and a few make sure everything's delicious okay so there's our plate and then what i like to do again take that micro planer and just hit it your finish is going to be just a little flake of that parmesan which is going to give it that cream flavor right over the top look at that oh could you get something more delicious than that that my friends is a delicious caesar salad all right guys favorite time let's taste it so first off presentation's perfect right you got the croutons perfect ratio the lettuce okay so we did the three heads we did one long begat and it's just got a beautiful when i say coating everything's got a nice cover so i'm gonna get one crouton and some lettuce is what i'm gonna do here so oh you can smell the garlic the salt the olive oil mmm butter from the crouton parmesan absolutely perfect you know it's got that salt the pepper the tang you get the little bit of that mustard comes out the acidity oh my god one more one more one more on camera i'm gonna eat the raspberry after how are you supposed to do a cooking show and not talk with food in your mouth i don't understand supposed to do the best seizure salad i think i've ever had absolutely delicious you know what's fun about that it's great it's it's one of those great salads that you can have it goes great with meat grows great with fish you're gonna have it in the winter delicious in the summer with that lemon you know crisp and clean and fresh with fresh ingredients oh my god so awesome love caesar salad certainly love sharing my recipes with you certainly love the comments and the discussions that we've been getting into and just the inspiration i think that we offer for some people just to get up and spend some time in the kitchen with your friends and family and so forth it's been great sharing my heritage my traditions with you hopefully you'll take some of these recipes and some of these videos share them with other people certainly subscribe to our channel and hopefully you'll set some of your own traditions and explore your own heritage with your family guys have a great week bon appetit talk to you guys next week

Channel: Cooking Italian with Joe

Views: 153,724

Keywords: www.cookingitalianwithjoe.com, vito and joe's italian extra virgin olive oil, Joe Borio, Crouton (Food), Caesar Salad (Dish), Salad (Type Of Dish), Cooking (Interest), Recipe, Cheese Sandwich (Food), Salad Burnet (Food), Balsamic Vinegar (Food), Mustard (Ingredient), Italian Dressing (Food), Parmigiano-Reggiano (Cheese), Giada De Laurentiis (Chef), Mario Batali (Chef), salad dressing balsamic salad dressing, homemade salad dressing, Italian food recipe

Id: 1tDkXTc-REc

Length: 25min 15sec (1515 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2015