Deconstructed Reconstructed Caesar Salad

I am going to tell you about the worst meal I ever had*.

About ten years ago I hosted an event for the Royal Society, who I’ve worked with for years and have funny stories about (they once nearly gave me emergency etiquette training because there was a slim chance a Royal might attend an event I was hosting). After the event, the speaker, organisers and I went to a very upmarket restaurant for dinner.

This was a London restaurant, so I expect them to have heard of vegetarians. However it was the sort of London restaurant whose clientele is mostly overspending tourists and utter bellends in town for “business”. It’s near a shop that sells shooting gear to aristocrats, if you know what I mean.

I ordered a caesar salad, but asked for it to come without chicken and bacon. Partly because eating dead animals is wrong, but mainly because these aren’t ingredients of a caesar salad, unless you’re in Wetherspoons or a Wetherspoons impersonator venue. This was not a Wetherspoons. The service wasn’t as good for a start.

What arrived was a bowl of chopped lettuce, a piece of toast (whole) and a boiled egg (whole). This cost the Royal Society SEVENTEEN POUNDS.

Was this a deconstructed salad? Was the intention that I chop the toast into croutons, and somehow turn the egg into a passable sauce using the salt and pepper on the table? Where was the cheese? Or was all of this the result of a chef who hates vegetarians because we stop them showing off their ability to burn a piece of meat and serve it with nine chips for thirty quid?

This got me thinking about what a good deconstructed caesar salad would be like. And what makes a caesar salad work at all.

A caesar salad is basically:

Green Stuff
Cheese
Crunchy stuff
Sauce

But what if the cheese WAS THE CRUNCHY STUFF? Thus was born the Deconstructed Reconstructed Caesar Salad.

INGREDIENTS:

One Lettuce.
Cheddar cheese with chilli in.
Caesar Dressing
Plain Flour**
Milk
Panko Breadcrumbs

INGREDIENT NOTES:

Lettuce – Ideally a Heart of Romaine but Cos, Little Gem or Ruby Gem also work nicely. You need something with a bit of structure to it because you’re going to be eating A LOT of it, and the sauce is going to start breaking it down if you’re not careful .

Cheese – as mature as you can get with chilli in (the chilli is going to cut through the deep-fried taste).

Dressing – I use Cardini’s or Newman’s because every supermarket stocks them and they’re not shit. Your mileage may vary.

Milk – I’ve done this with real milk, skimmed milk, almond milk, you name it.

Panko Breadcrumbs are crunchy as hell and work better in this recipe than lesser breadcrumbs.

METHOD:

Chop the cheese into pieces that are roughly 1x1x2 cm.

Make batter by mixing some flour with some milk. I realise that this is imprecise but I would say you’re looking for a medium batter – not something so wet it’s only suitable for making pancakes, but not something that is a challenge to dip the cheese in. The batter is glue and you’re going to have to eyeball it.

Put the breadcrumbs on a plate.

Chop the lettuce, wash and spin it. Put it in a nice big pasta bowl.

Heat a pan or deep fat fryer of groundnut oil***  to 375F/190C.

Fry 6 pieces of cheese at a time. Each one goes into the batter, gets coated, goes into the breadcrumbs, get coated, goes into the oil for 90 seconds to two minutes. You do NOT want liquid cheese in your oil because the cleanup is Vietnam War-esque. So err on the side of cooking less.

Once cheese croutons are fried put them on kitchen roll to dry.

Once all the cheese croutons are fried turn off the fryer or pan, put all the cheese croutons onto the lettuce.

Pour on slightly more dressing than you think is reasonable.

Instagram.

Eat while dealing with all the jealous attention.

FOOTNOTES:

*The second-worst meal I’ve ever had was also a caesar salad. The salad was rancid and had split (it seemed to be lumps of old butter floating in oil), the croutons were soaked in oil and more than half of the lettuce was rotten. The reason it’s only the second-worst, however, is that at least the restaurant didn’t dare charge for it! They made me pay for the beer I drank instead of eating it though. I bear a grudge.

** Gluten free flour and breadcrumbs work. Make sure you haven’t previously used the frying oil for WHEAT though.

*** don’t use any other oil for science’s sake.