# Salad Has No Business Being THIS Good ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Brian Lagerstrom - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy9CX9bvpAI - **Дата:** 26.04.2026 - **Длительность:** 18:17 - **Просмотры:** 392,005 ## Описание I’m taking the humble wedge salad and giving it a professional upgrade that makes it perfectly composed, super crispy, and way more flavorful than it has any right to be. Get up to 30% off coffee subscriptions at https://drinktrade.com/brian ▶️WATCH NEXT: Steak Au Poivre: https://youtu.be/fXMj9C-x0yc?si=TW8isnykP6eC1Ibt Big Ass Salad Recipes: https://youtu.be/KpIh4CxmtgU?si=uPN0lZWI--LdYLS_ 🔪MY GEAR: CUTTING BOARD: https://amzn.to/341OgnD TONGS: https://amzn.to/4e4IRlB HALF SHEET PAN: https://amzn.to/4u52z5c FAVORITE STAINLESS BOWL: https://amzn.to/48lty4h MESH STRAINER: https://amzn.to/4sRTuMe AMAZON STORE: https://www.amazon.com/shop/brianlagerstrom **As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases** RECIPE Bleu Cheese Dressing: 85 g (5 ¾ Tbsp) buttermilk 35 g ( 2 ½ Tbsp) sour cream 150 g ( ⅔ cup) mayonnaise (Duke's strongly preferred) 5 g (1 tsp) garlic powder 5 g (1 tsp) onion powder 2 g (¼ tsp) salt 35 g ( ¼ cup) bleu cheese, very finely chopped 8 g ( 3 Tbsp) fresh dill, chopped 8 g ( 3 Tbsp) fresh chives, sliced Wedge Salad: • 450g (1 lb) regular-sliced bacon • 1 large head iceberg lettuce, quartered • 1 red onion, brunoise diced and rinsed • 1 beefsteak tomato, seeds removed, brunoise diced • Extra bleu cheese crumbles, for topping • Fresh chives and picked dill, for garnish 1. Bake bacon at 350°F on a parchment-lined tray for 18–20 minutes until dark and rigid. Drain the fat by propping up the tray, then cool and dice into small bits. 2. Make the dressing by whisking together the buttermilk, sour cream, mayo, spices, salt, and herbs. Fold in the minced blue cheese. 3. Quarter the iceberg and remove the core. Pull out the center three layers to create a "valley" for the toppings. 4. Cover wedges in damp paper towels and freeze for 10 minutes to maximize the crunch. 5. Finely dice the red onion and rinse under cold water to take the edge off. 6. Seed and dice the tomatoes, and prep the remaining herbs and cheese crumbles. 7. Place a chilled wedge in a bowl and sauce it heavily to get the dressing into the layers. Add the bacon, tomatoes, onions, and herbs. Spoon a base of dressing onto a plate, place the loaded wedge on top, and finish with a final dressing drizzle and extra cheese crumbles. CHAPTERS: 0:00 Rending bacon 1:48 Making the blue cheese dressing 6:33 Prepping the iceberg lettuce 11:10 Prepping the toppings 14:16 Assembly ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy9CX9bvpAI) Rending bacon In my opinion, a wedge salad hits the ceiling of pleasure that's possible for a dish called a salad. M. In this video, I'm going to show you how to make a really good wedge at home without over complicating the process and while also sharing a few techniques that you can use to make any salad taste better. To get started, I'm going to grab 12 oz or one standard package of thin sliced bacon and then lay it out neatly on a half sheet tray. If you're wondering about thick cut bacon, I would probably avoid it for this recipe just because it takes a pretty long time to render. And for a wedge salad, you want bacon that's really, really crispy. And I think the best way to get that is actually with thinner bacon. You might notice that I've had to overlap these strips just a tiny bit. That's to squeeze as much bacon onto this sheet tray as humanly possible. And sometimes you'll be able to get the entire package onto a tray, and sometimes you'll have to kind of make it work. Like right here, I've got some space available, but I can't fit a whole piece. So, I'm going to trim that up. Slide that in. And that leaves me with like two and a half pieces in the package, which is fine. I'll save that for breakfast. All right. Once this bacon is nicely laid out on a sheet tray like this, I'm going to move it over to a 350F oven, and I'm going to render it for about 18 to 25 minutes until it's deeply golden brown and super crispy. If you're wondering about rendering the bacon on the stove top like you saw your mom do when you were a child, please don't do that because it is kind of dangerous because it gets really splattery and bacon fat goes all over the place. But also, it's not even really a good way of rendering bacon. It cooks the bacon super unevenly because the bacon kind of sizzles up into these wavy patterns where some of the bacon is touching the hot fat and some of it isn't. We need flat slabs of bacon that are 100% crispy for this. And the oven, I think, is the only way to really get that done. Plus, it's passive and gives you plenty of time for other activities ### [1:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy9CX9bvpAI&t=108s) Making the blue cheese dressing like making the dressing. Into a medium bowl, I'll combine 85 g of buttermilk. If you can't find buttermilk or you're not going to go out of your way to buy it, you could sub in 30 g of sour cream and 100 g of regular milk. Next, speaking of sour cream, I'm going to add in 35 g of that. Then 150 g of mayonnaise. I think the best offtheshelf mayo is probably Dukes, so that's what I'm using here. Not sponsored, by the way, but Duke, if you're out there, I'm listening, bro. Next, I'm going to add in 5 g of garlic powder and 5 g of onion powder. I'm using powders in here instead of fresh aromatics like garlic and shallot because they kind of remind me of like Hidden Valley ranch powder. They have this unique savory quality and almost umaminess to them that is really nostalgic and really delicious. And you can't get that from fresh. Then I'll add in 2 g of salt, 8 to 10 g of fresh chopped chives, and dill. Then I'll just stir to get everything combined. If you want to skip the fresh herbs here just because they're expensive or kind of hard to get, you can definitely sub in dried here, but with some caveats. Number one, you need way less because they're dehydrated and the flavor is concentrated. So instead of 8 to 10 gram, I would say use two each maximum. And number two, I just think it kind of changes the flavor profile of this into something that isn't quite as fresh or interesting. Dried herbs especially have their use cases and I love them. They're just a little bit of a different kind of ingredient than fresh and they can taste a little bit dusty, especially when they're mixed with the buttermilk and the sour cream here. I just think the fresh are so much better. So, if you can get them and you're willing to spend the $3 or $4 for the little clamshell, I think it's really, really worth it. Now, at this point, we've got a really beautiful, flavorful, fresh ranch dressing, which is going to be the base of this blue cheese. If you didn't know, blue cheese dressing is essentially just ranch with cheese in it. So you could use this straight away as ranch. Anywhere ranch is good, which is pretty much everywhere. So to turn this into blue cheese, I've grabbed a block of firm, dry bl. And then I'll cut it down into chunks and then cut those chunks into even smaller chunks. And if you're wondering about using pre-crumbled blue cheese like this uh Belgioso stuff that you can get at most grocery stores, this is fine and it will work. But in terms of taste, it's like a 6 out of 10 at best. And I actually think this product or stuff like it is a big reason why a lot of people, including myself, don't love blue cheese. It's a little bit bitter. The funkiness and medicinal quality is really, really pronounced and not that elegant or balanced or delicious. So, it's just fine. like it will work in this salad, but it's not going to be amazingly [clears throat] delicious. Now, I went out of my way to get this point reuses blue cheese that's really firm and sweet because it actually tastes good on its own. Like, this is pleasurable. Like I said, it's sweet. It's balanced. That funky blue cheese medicine flavor is turned way down. It's way more rounded off and part of the flavor experience. Like, I like this a lot. and it really makes a big difference in your perception of the blue cheese flavor in the entire dish. So, I would go way out of my way to get something like this. Once the cheese is chopped, I'm just going to slide all 35 grams in with my herby ranch dressing. And then I'm just going to come back and smush up the crumbles a little bit and stir until everything's combined. I do want to keep it a little bit on the chunky side, though, just because if we were to stir this until everything was smooth and homogeneous, the dressing would actually be gloppy and thick, and that's not what we're looking for. We want to have a little bit of sauciness to it. And that looks really good. M man, that's like a really clean ranch with blue cheese influence and that's exactly what you want in a wedge. You get this fresh twanginess from the ranch and then some subtle mild funkiness throughout the entire thing that kind of ties it together. It's really good. The blue cheese really brings a layer of flavor that makes the entire thing taste better. The bacon's ready to be checked. The bacon has gotten really, really dark red. borderline brown actually, which is what you want. You want to take this bacon a little bit further than maybe you're comfortable with because we need it to be super crispy. Texturally, I want it to shatter when I bite into it or when I run a knife through it because that's going to make it kind of like a bacon bit or a meat crouton. Now, as this bacon cools, I want to make sure that it's not sitting in its own fat because the closer it gets to room temperature, the more likely that fat's going to be to congeal onto the bacon, and then it's going to give it this really slick, greasy mouth feel that's not pleasant at all. So, to prevent that, I'm just going to move this bacon over to the stove here and prop it up with a little plate so that the bacon fat runs down to the edge so that nothing gets greasy in the middle part here. Next, I'm going to take my dressing and throw it in the fridge to keep it chilly for a little while I prep the most important part of this ### [6:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy9CX9bvpAI&t=393s) Prepping the iceberg lettuce entire dish, which is the iceberg lettuce. To do that, I'm just going to clean up any wilted brown leaves on the outside. That's usually the first two layers or so. And that's just from sitting in a refrigerator for a while. 86 that. Then I'm going to clean up the core a little bit. Maybe take off an inch and a half. Get rid of that. And then I'm going to cut this into fourths. There we go. Now we got nice big chunks of iceberg. By the way, I've only cut up one head here, which is four portions, but we have enough dressing and enough bacon rendered off to easily make 8 to 10. So, if you cut up two to three heads, you'd have a ton of wedges to serve to a whole party. Okay. Once I've got the uh heads cleaned up here, I'm just going to set them aside. Then I'm going to take one quarter at a time and pull out the inner three or four layers, just enough to give us a little bit of a pocket on the inside. This is going to enable us to have the salad hold a lot more dressing. One problem I have with a lot of wedges is that they're triangles, so all the stuff that you put on top of them kind of just bounces off and falls onto the plate. This gives it just a little bit more flatness, which lets it catch more stuff. I also want to make sure that the lettucees are kind of laying flat on their own. This one is a little bit tilted forward. So, I'll on the back side I'll just flatten it a bit so that it sits flatter and cleaner on the plate. And then again, I'll just rip out the middle three layers or so to give me something that's a little bit flatter. And if there's an excessive amount of core that's not going to be that delicious to eat, you can just zip that out with a knife and have a little snack. Man, I just freaking love iceberg so much. It's like juicy. That's a really good way to describe it. The cell walls as you crunch down on them, they just explode lettuce water into your mouth. Also, if you can't find iceberg for some reason, I would say you could sub in little gem lettuce, which also has this really tight cause leaf that's a variety of lettuce. It has this tight cause lettuce head style that's very juicy and also very delicious. Or you could use a romaine heart in a pinch, but definitely don't use romaine leaves. That's going to be an entirely different textural experience. And in that case, you might as well just make a different type of salad. Once I've got some beautiful quarters of iceberg here that are laying flat nicely and have a little bit of their cores removed to catch some extra toppings, I'm going to move them over to a little plate. And then I'm going to top that plate with a double layer of damp paper towels. This is going to keep them from drying out during the next phase, which is putting them in the freezer for about 10 to 15 minutes. No more than that, though, because they can get pretty cold pretty fast. This, if you're worried, is not actually going to freeze the lettuce at all. What it's going to do is create all this internal tension inside of the iceberg head that makes it even more gushing with that wet crispiness and it just makes it cold, which I think is an essential detail. Temperature is a lever that I think a lot of home cooks don't spend enough time thinking about. Speaking of temperature, ooh, I want to take a quick second to thank Trade Coffee for providing me with this tasty cold brew coffee and for sponsoring this vid. Unfortunately, I think most people who make coffee at home don't make good tasting coffee. I was one of those people for sure. I suffered for years chugging warm, burnt tasting rain water in the morning and just kind of didn't know that it could be better. That's where Trade Coffee came in. If somehow at this point you don't know who Trade Coffee is, they're the number one destination online in America for both hot and cold coffee. And their coffee tastes really freaking good. They've gotten it so good because they've built deep relationships and partnered up with over 55 of the top coffee roasters from across the country. The process of getting this coffee is also very simple. You just take a quick online quiz. Then Trade matches you up with coffees that are tailored to your tastes and match all of your preferences. Then the coffee is roasted to order and shipped directly to your door. Trade also has all of these coffees that are roasted specifically for making cold brew style coffee at home, which if you haven't had before is at least three times better than the stuff you can buy pre-b brewed at the grocery store. And it is as good as anything I've ever had at a fancy coffee shop. Ooh, with a little cream. Dude, that tastes like coffee ice cream. That's good. So, if you guys want to try Trade right now, they're offering up to 30% off of new coffee subscriptions over at drinktrade. com/brien. This is a very lowrisk thing to try you guys because they'll send you a bag and if you don't like it, they'll send you a different bag for free. Again, that's drinktrade. com/brien to get up to 30% off your new subscription. Thank you, Trade. While ### [11:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy9CX9bvpAI&t=670s) Prepping the toppings the iceberg firms up in the freezer, I'm quickly going to bust out all the garnishes for this salad. And I'm going to start with a half to a full red onion. It kind of depends on how much red onion you want to eat here. And I'm going to give it a pretty small dice. I wouldn't quite say this is a Brunwise, but it is pretty small. And I'm going to be cutting all the garnishes for this salad quite small just because one of my biggest pet peeves with a wedge salad is actually when the stuff is too big and it just falls off and it's not a very unified eating experience. Got the onions moved over into a little fine mesh strainer here and I'm going to move it over to the sink and I'm going to rinse off all of the raw sulfury edge. This is a move that I do 100% of the time if I intend to eat these onions raw. For four wedge salads, I think a half of a red onion is good. But if I was going to go up to that 8 to 10, I'd probably cut a whole one. Next, I'm going to grab about one small to medium tomato for every two wedges. And then I'm going to cut those down. I'll start by slicing pretty thin. Again, we're going small. Maybe it's somewhere in between a small dice and a brunwise. Maybe about a/ third of an inch. Definitely smaller than a half. And for being kind of out of season, these tomatoes look pretty red. You want to avoid something that's firm and white. They should have a little bit of give and softness to them. Once I've got my tomatoes sliced up, I'm going to come back and give it a dice. I wouldn't use cherry tomatoes for this either, just because the skins are very thick and they're not that juicy. Now, if you guys haven't noticed since this point, I'm a little bit mentally ill when it comes to like the details of food. And there's something here that I think really is important which can be cleaned up. There's a lot of tomato gel and tomato seeds in these tomatoes. It's going to make your salad a lot wetter and doesn't really bring any flavor. So, what I would do is kind of lay out my dice cleanly on the cutting board like this. And if I see excessive amounts of seeds or gel or the white piffy stuff, I'll just scoot that off to the side and kind of edit this down into a cleaner, more beautiful tomato dice. It's just a matter of really finding it and scooting it off to the side. It doesn't have to be totally perfect, but if you can get rid of some of that stuff, your salad's going to be much less sloppy. And when it's all said and done, I mean, that's a pretty significant amount of wet cruddy stuff that we got out of these tomatoes. I think that's going to make for a better salad. When you combine three, four, five of these little details all in one dish, it takes something from being Btier to S tier. Now, to cut the bacon, I'm just going to grab some strips off the stove here, throw it on some paper towel, and give it a quick dab off. We just don't want excessive fat in the salad because there's so much with the sour cream and the buttermilk and everything. I'm gonna kind of cut it into again like a small dice. It's really crispy though, so it's going to kind of just shatter as I cut it, which is what we're looking for. But I am going to kind of give it a bit of a dice just to make sure that I get it into that small squareish size. And if other stuff crumbles down along the way, that's ideal actually. We want a variety of sizes of bacon here. It's going to give us a bunch of different textures all the way from super brittle to something that has a bit more substance. All right, [snorts] bacon cut. Time to build the salad. I'm going to snag the ### [14:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy9CX9bvpAI&t=856s) Assembly iceberg out of the freezer. And at this point, it is crispy, dude. It's ice cold, which is exactly what you want. It's one of the biggest mistakes that people make with wedges is not being conscious of the temp. I'm going to build these one at a time. This is kind of a unique way to do this, but I think it gives you the best results. You could put them all on a plate and put a bunch of stuff on top of them, and that would be totally fine. But if you want S tier wedge, I think this is the way you got to go. So, I'm going to put one quarter of my iceberg in a bowl. Then, I'm going to bathe it in dressing. I'm going to put some in the middle here. Quite a bit in the middle. And then, I'm going to pour it over the sides and then come back with my spoon and kind of massage it in to the folds of the lettuce. A lot of wedges, the dressing just kind of sits on top. If we can allow it to drip into the layers a little bit, that's ideal. The reason I'm doing it in the bowl is that the bowl can kind of catch the extra stuff. It allows me to be heavy with the dressing on the salad without worrying about flooding the plate with too much dressing or too much garnishes and stuff. This is exactly how I would tell my cooks to build it if I was the chef of this theoretical wedge salad restaurant. Next, I'm going to add on a generous amount of diced tomatoes. And you can be pretty heavy with them because again, anything that falls off is just going to go in the bowl, not on the plate. Then I'll put on probably about half the amount of onions as tomatoes. These are obviously very pungent and you don't need a ton. Next is going to be bacon. You can go pretty heavy here. That's looking really good. Now, this is an optional step, but you can take a little bit more dressing at this point and put it on top of that stuff so that it has a little bit of extra glue to hold on the cheese and a little bit of fresh herbs that we're going to put on top. So, I'm coming back with some finely minced chives and uh some nice pieces of dill here that I've picked and chopped to bring just like a little bit more beauty and some of that additional fresh herb flavor that we've got in the dressing. It kind of just echoes that. And then finally, I'm going to crumble on some blue cheese right on top of that. If you're using the pre-rumbled stuff, it's going to be a little bit drier. If you're using a higher quality blue cheese, it's probably a little bit softer and a little bit more smeary. And in total, it's maybe 15 to 20 small pieces of blue cheese. I don't like to go crazy on it. I think it's a wonderful flavor in moderation. I've got enough in here to maybe get a pop of blue cheese every other bite. Okay, so next I'm going to lay down my salad plate. Then take a spoonful of dressing, drop it into the center, and kind of smooth that out. That acts as glue to hold the wedge in place, but it's also just a little bit more dressing. Keep in mind that this is a giant piece of salad that is mostly undressed. Then finally, I'm going to lift this wedge out of the bowl and place it neatly on my plate. If you wanted to, you could rescue the crumbly stuff that was in the bowl and kind of come back and sneak that here and there. And that looks wonderful. It looks so beautiful. Looking at it, you can just tell it's beautifully composed. It has the right amount of stuff and it's going to taste great. M man. M m. It's the juiciest. It just floods your entire mouth. You crush into the iceberg and then like it just explodes and it's moist from the front of your mouth all the way to like your jowls. It kind of reminds me of like a ribeye actually. It's very savory too because of the bacon. I also think we did it on the blue cheese. There's like the perfect amount in here to kind of funk things up and make it interesting, but it's not so much that you're going to be fatigued and sick of it by the end of eating this dish. I just think this is probably the best wedge that I've ever had. And I know that it's annoying that I always glaze my own food on this channel, but I put a lot of work into this recipe and it's really good. I hope you guys make it. If you guys want to make the recipe, I'll throw a shorter version down in the description along with a link to my blog, brianlaggerstrom. com, where there will be a much longer, more detailed version with lots of photos and stuff. And if you actually want to make the recipe, that's probably a place to do it from. As always guys, thank you so much for your time and attention. Thank you for sticking around to the end of the video, and I'll see you next time. --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/52475*