Winter salads … getting back to our roots

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 23, 1998 by Mary Caldwell

Think salad, think summer ... think again. While light, leafy concoctions are the name of the game for warm-weather fare, winter menus across the nation are offering a decidedly heartier selection of salads.

Winter salads often include greens, to be sure -- from tender baby lettuces, spinach, radicchio and peppery arugula to sturdy romaine and the currently popular frisee and mizuma -- but they're teamed with a selection of more robust ingredients, such as winter fruits, root vegetables, nuts and assertive cheeses.

"I think winter salads get a bad rap in the sense that it's hard to beat those summer products, the fresh corn, the fresh lima beans, the hundreds of kinds of tomatoes that we have ... whereas in winter, we have to go back into mother earth and really work with our root vegetables," says Henry Meer, chef-proprietor of New York's Cub Room. "It also gives an opportunity to work with our dried beans, French green lentils and things like that."

For Valentine's Day Meer offered a whimsical salad of seared and peppered heart-shaped fresh tuna with an ambrosia of green papaya, parsnips, carrots, turnips, beets, fingerling potatoes and ruby grapefruit served with roasted garlic and a simple lemon vinaigrette.

The humble beet is showing up with greater frequency in winter salads this year, with the preparation more glamorous than the plain, boiled beets or pickled beets of generations past.

Braised beets star in a popular salad at The Frog and The Peach in New Brunswick, N.J. Chef Eric Hambrecht braises the beets in red wine vinegar and salted water and then cools, peels and dices them. Hambrecht makes a red wine vinegar-and-grapeseed oil dressing to serve over the salad, which also includes diced shallots, chives, toasted walnuts and crumbled goat cheese, all arranged in the center of the plate and garnished with a mix of baby field greens, such as arugula, red oak and mizuma.

At Mantuano in Chicago, a popular menu item resembles a savory "napoleon" made with beets and goat cheese and surrounded by mixed green salad and walnuts in red-wine vinaigrette.

Fresh horseradish imparts verve into a beet salad at Ajax Tavern in Aspen, Colo. Chef Tobias Lawry's menu features an earthy salad of roasted beets and lentits with a dressing spiked with fresh horseradish and mint. "We use fresh horseradish with champagne vinegar and let that steep for a while," Lawry explains. "Then we add sour cream. That becomes a dressing for a variety of lentils with broth, celery and shallots, then baby beets that are roasted and peeled. That goes in a cup of radicchio that's been chilled in ice water so that the bitterness goes away." The finishing touch is a beet dressing that Lawry makes by cooking down a puree of raw beets to bring out the natural sweetness, then folding that with mint oil made at the restaurant.

Cheese -- especially blue cheese -- and nuts, often teamed with pears or apples, are being used widely in winter salads, too. Executive chef Jean Luc Kieffer of New York City's newly opened Pondicherry explains the natural affinity of the blue cheese and the Asian pear in one of his salads as a nice balance "between the strength of the cheese and the sweetness of the pear, basically -- like Stilton and port wine." Pondicherry's winter menu features a walnut-endive salad with Roquefort and caramelized Asian pear in a champagne-and-walnut oil vinaigrette.

The Frog and The Peach also has a salad of Belgian endive, arugula and radicchio with sliced apples, Roquefort cheese and pine nuts in an apple cider vinaigrette.

At Clementine in New York, chef John Schenk evokes his childhood by using iceberg lettuce wedges in a winter salad with bacon and buttermilk-Roquefort dressing with crouton and scallions. "The people who order it love it, but you have to have a little bit of personal strength," Schenk says with a laugh, acknowledging iceberg's less-than-vaunted status. "I really wanted to do something very fun and classic. I liked using iceberg because it's the neglected green. I still think it has a place in the American palate history. When other people in the business look down upon something, I think, well, there must be something fun about it. "

What makes Schenk's salad different is the two large croutons underneath the lettuce. "The dressing soaks into the croutons, and it almost becomes a blue cheese bread pudding, and that to me is the most interesting thing about the salad," he says. "You get through all this crunchiness and get to something that's very soft and mushy, a surprise. "

Autumn lettuces with apples, spiced walnuts and blue cheese have wintered over from fall on the current menu at San Francisco's Fog City Diner but will depart before spring. Executive chef Chris Torla tosses thin slices of apple and finely sliced celery with the restaurant's greens mixture plus crushed, candied walnuts with maple walnut vinaigrette; he sprinkles crumbled Maytag blue cheese around the plate and over the salad before serving.

At The Dining Room of the Hilton at Short Hills, N.J., chef de cuisine Paul Sale and executive chef Walter Leffler choose a slightly different approach, pairing Stilton in a salad with portobello mushrooms. "The warmth of the meatylike mushroom really enriches the whole dish," Leffler says. "It makes it a little bit on the heavier side than one I would make for summertime."