MY Chicken Caesar – Dressing from Scratch

It’s a classic, but I really do think my caesar dressing recipe is the best, I’ve taken a long time to develop it and it really works:

Caesar Dressing
3 garlic cloves
40g parmesan
85g gordal olives
40g dijon mustard
50g anchovy
80g egg yolk
1 lemon juice
500g veg oil
450g olive oil
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150g crème fraiche
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Using a robot coupe add all the ingredients except for the oils, blend for 2 minutes until smooth. Add the oils and emulsify, pass through muslin.

Cooked Chicken Legs
Place in a cold pan and bring up the heat slowly and render until the chicken thighs are golden brown and crisp. Cook only skin side down. Finish in the oven.

Can you hear that? It’s just absolutely incredible. Okay, so here’s my very classic chicken Caesar salad, but it’s a bit more than that. More than the sum of its parts. It’s not one of those salads you just throw in a bowl, mix it up, and tuck in. I love a Caesar salad. So, I wanted to work out how to make the best version of it. This is it. Ingredients wise we have lemon, dijon mustard, raw garlic, anchovies, parmesan, egg yolk, creme fresh, and green olives. This is the dressing for Caesar salad. For the actual salad, we’ve got this romaine lettuce which has been compressed. I’ll talk about that in the video. Some parmesan, some crisp bread, some really good anchovies, and a bit of crispy parmesan. That there is Caesar salad. The chicken comes later. So, arguably the key part of any Caesar salad is the Caesar dressing. This is a cracking Caesar dressing. You can buy them in supermarkets, but the one below I have developed for years and years. I think it’s brilliant. Make it keep it in the fridge a couple of weeks. Use it for all different manner of of of dressings in the kitchen or or for on the side of your roast chicken, whatever you want. It’s a just a really good dressing to have in your armory. You can make it in a flask blender. You can make in the Theromix. I use Robocoop cuz I’m a bit older and I like a Robbo Coupoop. Makes me feel safe. In it goes. Dijon mustard goes first. This is the emulsifying agent, so it’s really important. It’s going to keep everything together and bound. In that goes the egg yolk. These are pasteurized, so we can serve that in the restaurant. Can’t really use raw yolks in a restaurant. Now, I’m going to add into that anything that’s got texture. So, in goes the olives. In goes the anchovies. These are just the normal sort of more economical version of anchovies. In goes the garlic. And we’ll leave the rest until later. Give that a really good spin and let that do its magic. Get it really well mixed up and creamed up together. In there’s going to go some neutral oil. Very slowly you’re making a mayonnaise. So you’re making a mayonnaise. So in it goes really slowly like that. Rain in the oil very slowly. Nice and rainy like that. And you won’t get any problems with it. If you go faster, big problem. There he goes. Okay, I’m about halfway on my oil now. I’m going to stop there and I’m now going to spoon into that. My Parmesan is going to go in. Now, this is grated aged Parmesan. Use the best quality Parmesan you can. In it goes. This is adding that sort of really lovely salty finish to the dressing. The juice of half a lemon that’s going in there. And then we’re going to add I know this is a bit odd, but this is creme fresh. Gives us that rich creamy finish to it. And then we can finish the rest of the oil. Just check the seasoning. Sometimes the anchovies aren’t as strong as you think. Sometimes the garlic isn’t as strong. The olives are not as strong. You just need to check the seasoning. It needs to be punchy. This dressing needs to be big and punchy, but also creamy and delicious at the same time. If you look at that dressing now, it’s quite thick. I like it like that, but I do want it to be a little bit thinner than that. It’s very simple to do. I just want it to be able to coat and drop between the layers of the leaves of that lettuce. So, all I’m going to do is add a little bit of neutral water into that. And it will just it will just let the whole thing down. It’ll it won’t make it split. It will just let it down and make it a little bit thinner. But you just have to readjust that seasoning with a bit more salt to bring it back up again because that’s obviously very neutral. So, drop that back and you’ll see it will just give us a bit of a looser texture which is going to sort of sit on top of that lettuce much nicer. So, there you go. But that’s just, you know, different eggs. It’ll always be a little bit of adjustment, but don’t be scared to do that. A recipe is just a guideline. So, here’s a really good way of getting all the bits and pieces out of that dressing, getting all the pieces of anchovi. And this dressing has no real elements that can go off. So it happily sit in your fridge for a couple of weeks, no problem. So we don’t want all those bits of an bits of olives in there. So just use a nice thin muzzling cloth like this. Um and then just pop it in there. Squeeze it through. Just say if you’re using a shimar really that will all just squeeze through and give you a really beautiful silky texture. Okay. So for this chicken Caesar salad, we’ve cooked some chicken in a cold pan. Salt. Chicken with the bone in. Really important. Whole eggs, bone in, cold pan, salt, olive oil, low temperature. Press on top. So I have this pan pressed on top with the cartou. And you end up with this fantastic sort of glass-like chicken. I mean, you got that amazing crispy skin. Look at that. Can you hear that? It’s just absolutely incredible. That’s how you cook chicken. We’ll do that in another video maybe, Sam. E beautiful. So, that’s our chicken. It’s now been deboned as well, so it’s all kind of ready for the plate. Now, it’s just a construction job. This is how I build my Caesar salad. First of all, I’m going to take my lovely plate that was bought for me as a Christmas present from Aaron Potter from Wild Flowers. I treasure it and think it’s absolutely beautiful. I’m going to make a sort of Caesar salad extravaganza. Here’s that lovely dressing that goes on the bottom. So, plenty of that dressing on the bottom. And we’re going to take this chicken been deboned. Going to put these pieces of chicken on the bottom like this. So, this isn’t a chicken scissor salad for one person. This is a chicken scissor salad as a sharing platter for people. Okay, that can sit there. Then we’re going to move on to this to the romaine lettuce. So this lettuce here has been compressed. Very common modern word. Now what does it mean? It means putting that lettuce into a bowl of ice, cling filming it, and then putting on full power in a vacuum packed machine. If you’re at home, that ain’t going to happen. However, keep that washed up lettuce in really icy water. Leave it in the ice water for at least 15 minutes. Shake it out really well and you’ll get practically the same thing. We’re just compressing all the fibers of that lettuce together to get extra crunch. That’s all that is. Cut that lettuce straight down the middle through the root. And that’s really important. I then take off the back of the lettuce so that it sits nice and flat as well. And I just take out the middle of that root cuz it’s a little bit crunchy there. And it sits just across there like that. Open the lettuce up. Encourage me to encourage it to give me lots of avenues to put the dressing in as well. Right, let’s clear this away. I’ve got some bread crisps. Really important in a chicken Caesar salad. This is just the crispy bread that we use at Trinity for our tartar. Actually, they’re just bread that’s been cut very thinly, baked in the oven with some olive oil under a uh press. So, that’s got something pressing it down to encourage it to be compressed like that. Just finding the grooves of the lettuce that put the pieces of bread in. So, we’re getting a bit of height in here as well. Then, we also make some little Parmesan crisp. So this is just parmesan which is grated onto a tray and baked in the oven. It has a fantastic way of just becoming nice and crispy and brittle like pieces like that. Literally just parmesan grated onto a tray and baked in the oven. That’s all it is. Absolutely love that. What we’re going to do now is dress that with our dressing. Give it another go cuz I don’t think you can have too much dressing on a Caesar salad. And we’re going to take these anchovies which are the really lovely expensive smoked anchovies. Pop those on top. What we need now is some lovely aged salty parmesan on top of that. And that is my elevated completely fabulous overly dressed indulgent chicken Caesar salad. I think if you have a dinner party and you make that then it’s quite cool. Right. There you go. That is my chicken Caesar salad. Enjoy.