Food & Wine (October 2014)
Zach's parents were in town for a visit this past weekend and we had a great time together. We toured a wonderful art museum, had an excellent dinner at Buck's Fishing and Camping to celebrate Zach's mom's birthday, and generally just enjoyed walking around the city on a gorgeous early autumn weekend.
We also cooked at home. We made a not-that-special, help-us-eat-some-of-our-CSA-vegetables dinner when they arrived on Thursday.
But for Saturday night, we wanted to try some new recipes we'd dog-eared in some of our latest food magazines.
We had zeroed in on this Grilled Fig Salad with Spiced Cashews from Food & Wine. The magazine stamped this the "Salad of the Month." We loved the idea of the unusual ingredient combinations, along with other little twists, like using Chinese Five-Spice to flavor the cashews.
But this salad turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Let's talk about how to fix it.
First let's talk about the components. We love these spiced glazed cashews! Seriously, you should bookmark these if only to make them as snacks for a future party. They're delicious, and the Chinese Five-Spice is a fabulous way to add tons of flavor in no time. The final result is almost like a sweet-savory cashew brittle.*
And the grilled figs are ... fine. They're good. Honestly, they didn't have a ton of flavor, and even grilled they were somewhat watery and bland. This may have more to do with the quality of figs available to us -- we could only find a few small boxes of them tucked away at Whole Foods. Maybe fresher figs would have imparted more flavor and texture.
But the whole here was less than the sum of the parts. The Asian-ish dressing is good, but we found it too thin and insubtantial to really pull all the ingredients together. The cashews -- which, again, we really liked -- were too big to really be a part of the salad, you know?
Our biggest problem was with the Bibb lettuce. The recipe says you can use either oak leaf or Bibb lettuce; we used Bibb. We don't think that's the way to go here: Bibb lettuce is just so light and mild, we felt like it just added to the overall blah-ness of the salad.
So we have a couple thoughts on how we would do this differently:
- Smaller cashews. The recipe says to break them up "into individual pieces"; we would advocate actually using a knife to roughly chop them. It would better incorporate them into the salad.
- No Bibb. At the least, we'd vote for using the oak leaf lettuce suggested by the recipe. You could also mix in something more substantial and more bitter, like radicchio or endive lettuce. Or something sligtly peppery, like arugula or mizuna. For us, the Bibb was just restrained to the point of being a bit boring.
- Different figs? While we're at it, we might experiment with a different way to incorporate figs. If you can't find great, delicious fresh figs, what about using dried figs, reconstituted in a bit of scalding water for 5 minutes? We know that starts to be a very different salad -- we're just thinking out loud here. But dried figs would have given us tons more flavor than the store-bought fresh ones we were able to find. We love the notion of grilled fresh figs, but dried figs might be a delicious twist too.
We wanted to like this salad. It seemed like such a nice way to do a fall salad without being cliche -- you know, throwing in pumpkin seeds and butternut squash and hay bales and Indian corn and mums.
We wanted to taste this and say, "Yes. YES, Food & Wine. Verily, this is the salad of the month! Huzzah for this October salad!"
But we just couldn't. We know you have ideas for tweaking this recipe. Lay them on us!
*A word of warning: The glazed cashews are very sticky and crunchy. We don't want to gross you out here, but Zach's stepdad definitely lost a tooth cap whilst eating this salad. Oh no! So be careful!
Grilled Fig Salad with Spiced Cashews
Food & Wine (October 2014), recipe by Ratha Chaupoly and Ben Dait
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(This photo: Christina Holmes/Food & Wine)
Total time: 45 mins
Servings: 4
INGREDIENTS
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/4 teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder
1 cup raw cashews
Kosher salt
1/4 cup canola oil, plus more for brushing
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
2 tablespoons unseasoned rice wine vinegar
3 tablespoons finely grated peeled fresh ginger
3 scallions, green parts only, finely chopped (1/3 cup)
1 tablespoon toasted black sesame seeds
12 fresh figs, halved
Pepper
2 heads of Bibb or oak leaf lettuce (10 ounces), leaves torn
DIRECTIONS
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. In a medium saucepan, bring the sugar and 2 tablespoons of water to a boil. Boil over moderately low heat, undisturbed, until a light amber caramel forms, about 5 minutes. Using a wet pastry brush, wash down any sugar crystals on the side of the pan. Remove from the heat and whisk in the butter and five-spice powder. Stir in the cashews until evenly coated. Scrape the cashews onto the prepared baking sheet and spread in an even layer; season with salt and cool. Break up the glazed cashews into individual pieces.
Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk the 1/4 cup of canola oil with the sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, ginger, scallions and sesame seeds.
Light a grill and oil the grate. Brush the cut sides of the figs with oil and season with salt and pepper. Grill over moderate heat just until lightly charred and barely juicy, about 2 minutes per side; transfer to a plate.
In a large bowl, toss the lettuce with two-thirds of the dressing and season with salt and pepper. Arrange the lettuce on plates and top with the figs. Drizzle more dressing over the figs, sprinkle with the candied cashews and serve.
