American Classics with Scott Peacock: Chopped Salad

-A great chopped salad is a fresh great and healthful summertime meal, and nearly everything you need is available at your local farmer's market. What would you put into a chopped salad, Scott? -Some delicious dressing. -How do we make one? -We're making a creamy garlic dressing today, and we're just taking some fresh garlic, and we'll just chop this sort of coarsely at first, and then we'll gonna sprinkle over a little bit of kosher salt. -What does that do? -Well, it acts as a pumice because we're gonna rub it in a moment but it absorbs all the oils that come out of the garlic so they go into the salt and then into our dressing, not just soaked up into the cutting board. You can start rubbing it down. So, here in the bowl, we have the garlic paste and lemon juice. It's been sitting here for about 10 minutes. That gives it a good long time to work. -Okay. -And then we have some crme fraiche or sour cream and just put this in. And whisk it together and then tastes-- -I smell the garlic. -Yeah. So, we're using Romaine lettuce today and we've washed this in cool water and drained it and now we've got salad spinner like you can find at any hardware store, kitchen shop. You put small amounts in here. You don't wanna weight this down too much. You wanna spin not too aggressively. -Okay. -You know it. -Small batches at a time. -Small batches, take your time. It's worth at the end. The water comes up. This is pretty dry already. Great. And we'll just put this out in a single layer. Let's just cover this with another-- -Okay. -towel, again paper towels will work just fine, something absorbent. -[unk] towels, though. -Something absorbent. You can just keep this. I'm gonna use this again and again. and then just wrap it and roll it up like this and we double it over like this and we're gonna put this in a plastic Ziploc bag and put it in a refrigerator until you're ready to make salad. -Scott, you've got a garden's worth of fabulous crunchy stuff here. What goes first? -We're gonna build a salad. We've got all of our shredded home-dried lettuce here and we're gonna season that with a bit of Maldon salt. -And why Maldon? -It's delicious with a bit of sea salt. You could also use kosher salt -Okay. -and some pepper. -Lots of it. -I think it's helpful if you toss the salad just for the seasoning at this point. And you can do that for me? -Okay. -Alright. And then, we'll add in some corn and some tomatoes and some cucumber. -It's a chopped salad. -Yeah. And some green beans because we need more stuff. I'm gonna add a little bit of the dressing while you're tossing. -Oh, love this. Look how gorgeous. -We'll also gonna put in a little bit more chive. -The secret, you say. -Yeah. The chives are so delicious. I'm gonna go ahead and put in a little bit of this crisp, crumbled bacon. -That's big and it's everything better. -And in the last minute, we'll put in some avocado 'cause if you put it in too soon, -Oh, that's nice. -it gets all mashed up. -We don't want it mashed, though. -Exactly. -Gentle, right. -Exactly. -Just the last bit. -I'm Nancy Hopkins for Better.