The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Iceberg Salad

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Iceberg lettuce gets a bad rap, but can make a good wrap. In this episode, Kenji and Deb go all in on lettuce. From wedge salads with homemade ranch to chronicling the rise, fall, and resurgence of the hardest-working lettuce in the kitchen. Knife and fork wedge salads are just the tip of the iceberg. Iceberg lettuce soup? Pickled iceberg lettuce? We got you.  Recipes mentioned: Deb’s Iceberg Wedge with Blue Cheese (from Smitten Kitchen) Deb’s Baby Wedge Salad with Avocado and Pickled Onion (from Smitten Kitchen) Kenji’s Fully Loaded Iceberg Wedge Salad (from Serious Eats) Kenji says “Wedge Salads are Great” (Kenji’s Cooking Show)

Hey friends, it's Kevin Pang from America's Test Kitchen. I want to tell you about our storytelling podcast, Proof. We tell stories like follow the U.S. military's decades-long journey of creating an MRE pizza. We go behind the scenes of the Broadway musical Sweeney Todd to learn just how do the show's infamous pies get made. Every episode is filled with dynamic characters and lots of twists and turns. Check out Proof wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Hey, Recipe listeners. We are planning a special mailbag episode and we want, no need to hear

from you. We have thrown a lot of information at you, so we want to know. Do you have any questions about anything we've cooked so far this season? The second thing we want to know is what you have any questions about anything we've cooked so far this season? The second thing we want to know is, what are your pantry and kitchen essentials? If someone is brand new to cooking or setting up their first kitchen, what are the must-haves? And we'll share ours too, of course. We have a few ways that you can get in touch with us. Number one, post and tag us at Kenji and Deb on Instagram or TikTok. Send us a DM if you're shot. Number two, email us at TheRecipeWithKenjiAndDad

at gmail.com. You can send us a message or a voice note. And finally, you can leave us a voicemail at 202-709-7606. We're so excited to hear from you. Thanks in advance. People always complain that iceberg lettuce has no flavor, which I feel like is an issue that needs addressing. The dad jokes are coming in strong today.

I don't know how you could hate something this beautiful. Why is your lettuce so much bigger than mine? Why is your lettuce so small Kenji? I have an American size head of lettuce. Okay, like put it next to your... Put it next to my what? Your head. My head, okay.

Okay, yeah, no, you have like a cute tiny one. I have one of those like... I have the ones you could feed your family with. It's just because I've got a giant head it looks small From PRX is radio topia welcome to the recipe with Kenji and Deb where we help you discover your own perfect recipes Kenji is the author of food lab and the walk and a columnist for the New York Times and Deb is the author of Food Lab and The Walk and A Columnist for the New York Times. And Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen. She's also the author of three really good best-selling cookbooks. We're both professional home cooks which

means we can and will make the same dish 57 times in our quest for the perfect recipe. And on this show we want to pull back the curtain on the recipe development process so that you can figure out what works best for you. In this episode, we're going to be talking about wedge salads, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Oh boy. That's coming up on the recipe. Stay with us.

So Deb, did you ever watch Look Who's Talking with John Travolta and Christy Alley? I must have. Where they do the voices for the kids. And there's a scene in that where it's like they're imagining their future and John Travolta comes home and he's like, look, I stopped by the dump and I found this lettuce. Like it's still perfectly good. You just peel off the outer layers. And he's like a giant head of iceberg with floppy, dirty outer layers.

And he peels them off. And I think of that scene every time I pull iceberg out of the fridge, because the outer layers always are like, they look like they've been in a dump, you know, but then underneath it's always crisp and delicious. Wait, can you do wash iceberg before you eat it? I say yes. As I said here, like picking leaves off the head and eating them. Like, is my mom listening right now?

Cause if she's not, um, I will typically take off the outer and eating them. Like is my mom listening right now? Cause if she's not, um. I will typically take off the outer layers, assume that the insides have been protected by the natural protective sheath of leaves and, uh, and just go from there. I do not consistently, but when I do, for me, it's a less about my fear of bacteria and more about that. I really like what soaking lettuce in cold water does. It gets extra juicy and crisp.

So what you can do is you can, of course you don't wanna pull apart every layer, especially if you're trying to make it wet. So you can cut it into your quarters, soak it in a big bowl of cold water, and then you can just kind of leave it out on towels and it will drain itself. And they drain?

Yeah, it totally drains. I'm surprised by how well it drains. But at that point you've got the quarter, so it's all open. It's vented. When I make shredders, like when I shred it up for a burger or something, then I do soak it because I find the increased

torgidity is really important in a sandwich, especially in a hot sandwich where you're going to be dripping grease or something into it and you want it to stay really nice and crispy. Well, so basically lettuce is, iceberg is 96% water and we're going for like 97 or 98. Yeah, just give it another 4% and make it water, make it all water, you know.

What's so wrong with it being refreshing though? That's all right, if you can't find iceberg for your hamburger, I just recommend you just dip your bun in a cup of water just go ahead. Oh, gross. We are iceberg lettuce defenders. I feel like it gets a bad rap because it's not nutritional and it's mostly water

and it's- Gets a bad rap, but it makes a good rap. Does it? What do you use your iceberg lettuce to wrap? Oh, well, we do stir-fried chicken at home, but it's like the classic dish of stir-fried squab with pine nuts and lettuce wraps. That's delicious.

Yeah, we do it sometimes with tofu, sometimes with chicken, but yeah, like stir-fried chicken with pine nuts and a little bit of hoisin sauce that you wrap in lettuce leaves. You kind of use them as like, you know, like little taco boat type things. The inner leaves work too. I think I like the crispness of it.

They also work as taco wraps, right? They do. Yeah, and if you go to like an In-N-Out, which famously uses hand-leafed iceberg. Hand-leafed iceberg. They call it hand-leafed, yeah. What makes it hand-leafed iceberg? They're falsely trying to suggest that other restaurants

have robotic leafers or AI leafers working on their lettuce. And that they wanna make sure you know that the thing that leafed your lettuce was a human hand, probably attached to a human? Yeah. I don't think that's the flex it sounds like. And also I think iceberg is kind of at its best when it's left in chunks.

When it's unleafed. Yeah, I think it's nice to get that stack with that baklava like layer of lettuce that's all crunched straight through. I mean, that is the subject of our episode today, right? Is wedge salads. And I think the most important part of a wedge salad is that it comes in a shape

that you can use a knife and a fork on. That is not just a pile of leaves that you're kind of randomly pulling up. It's like, you gotta fork it and knife it to eat it, right? When I started cooking in the early 2000s, I feel like there was this big anti-iceberg moment. And I think it came out of probably the 90s where we started casting iceberg aside

in favor of baby field greens and mescaline mixes that were sold bagged. And we kind of had a real salad evolution where you were getting arugula and watercress and all these fancy delicate lettuces on plates and iceberg became this other. I mean, I think we largely have Alice Waters to thank. Alice Waters is, she's the godmother of California cuisine

and farm to table cooking. So when she opened up Chez Panisse in Berkeley in the 70s, I think, 1971, yeah, it was one of the very first sort of farm to table restaurants. And since then, she's been kind of a pioneer in that movement and a huge advocate of lettuces other than iceberg.

Yes, in 2001, she says, iceberg symbolizes all that is wrong with American food production. It's omnipresent. Did I say that right? It doesn't have a season. It doesn't have a sense of place. Basically, the only thing it has going for it is its durability. And the line of thinking goes that it's a lettuce for growers, for warehouses. It's a grocery store thing. It's not

for, it's not created with eaters in mind. I really do understand where she was coming from. She's done so much to take farm food to our table, the wild range of diversity you can have in lettuces and things you can grow in fields and our, all of our plates are better for it. I think it's important to note that in the context of that quote and in the context of 1970s US iceberg dominated lettuce in the US even more than it does today, it still does today, you know, like Romaine kale making inroads. You can get like mesclun mix at your local supermarkets now

But prior to this sort of 1970s 1980s before this movement started 90% of what you saw in supermarkets was going to be iceberg lettuce and it was that way for the previous hundred years or so Before that iceberg lettuce developed in the late 19th century It was loved in the u.s Because because it bears well with shipping so when railroads started shipping lettuce across the country in the early 20th century, iceberg was one of the varieties that you could pack into crates,

throw some ice on top of it, and it would be fine even going several hundred miles away. Now I read that it was originally developed in 1894 by Burpee Seeds and Plants. Who still make seeds. And that some people say it gets its name from the way it was transported in crushed ice, which you just referenced,

where the heads of lettuce look like icebergs. But I enjoyed reading Helen Rosner in the New Yorker a few years ago called us pure American horse shit, myth likely originating with Bruce Church, a depression era farmer and formidable salesman who founded what is now Fresh Express, one of the country's largest lettuce distributors. So we're not sure about the ice.

I think most sources I've found have said that the story of calling it Iceberg because it was shipped under ice, that's not where the name comes from because there are records of the name dating from previous to those shipping methods, and that it's more likely called Iceberg just because of its appearance, because it has that kind of whitish glacial look to it, but nothing to do with the shipping method. I also love that Helen Rosner piece, which she wrote for the New Yorker, it was in August of 2018. But early on in it,

she gets to one of the points that I like to make, which is that people say iceberg has no flavor. And I think those people are crazy. So I'll read you Helen's quote on it. She says, for starters, it's far from flavorless. So I'll read you Helen's quote on it. She says for starters It's far from flavorless focus your palate as you take a bite and notice a clean sweetness blooming beneath the watery crunch Deepening in the pale ruffle of the inner leaves and stems to a toasty bitterness with whispers of caraway and coriander seeds and I think she's right

I think if you eat iceberg lettuce and you think about what you're tasting like, it's not just sweet, it's not just watery, it's not just plain sweet, it's got a nice balance of sweetness and bitterness. It's definitely a much more subtle lettuce than say, you know, it doesn't have the peppery kick of arugula, but I find it to have more flavor than, I don't know, romaine, you know?

Like romaine to me tastes mostly just sweet, whereas iceberg has that sweetness with that little bit of bitterness on the back end. And I think obviously there is also something to say about its texture, right? There's nothing that has meat tastes mostly just sweet, whereas iceberg has that sweetness with that little bit of bitterness on the back end. And I think obviously there is also something to say about its texture, right? There's nothing that has that texture. I think about it always in the context of an In-N-Out hamburger, you know, which an In-N-Out hamburger, it has iceberg lettuce and it also has American cheese, which I think

are two ingredients that are often maligned, but are really a lot about texture. And if you think about their texture, there isn't an equivalent. Like there is no lettuce that has the equivalent crispness as iceberg and there is no cheese that has the equivalent meltiness as American cheese. And so if you think about them as texture elements, first and foremost, and then flavor elements after that,

I think they really don't have a replacement, which is why iceberg wedge salads are so unique. I was trying to think of like a substitute and the closest I could think of was Napa cabbage. Of course, the rib is quite different. And I was also thinking of Savoy cabbage has a little bit of that bruffliness, but it doesn't hold liquid the same way.

In fact, one of the things I like about it is that it roasts up very crisp because it's not very hydrated. So there really is nothing that is iceberg like that is not iceberg. I think that probably you started, came onto the food scene within a few years of when I did. And I think that we came on at a point where,

you know, when Alice Waters said what she'd said and has said things like that since. And so I immediately thought, but wait a second, I like iceberg, what do you mean? And I felt like if I wanted to have a good iceberg wedge I had to go to like a sports bar. Mmm. I always think of it as a steakhouse as like this Salad, yeah where someone can like serve it with like a knife shoved into it I get bummed if it arrives without a steak knife to be honest

Like it really needs that little like serrated sharp knife. I want precision cuts So Julia Reid in the New York Times in 2003, wrote a piece called Tip the Iceberg. And what she had noticed was that a lot of restaurants were suddenly putting iceberg salads back on the menu. And I think that's an interesting little pendulum swing too, where I remember, you know,

after 9-11, there was a lot of return to comfort food that was elevated, where we took a real, I felt like certain foods that had just been maybe diner foods or cafeteria foods were kind of coming back and they were getting revisited. There was straight up restaurants in New York City called cafeteria and diner that evolved at that time that worked on comfort food classics.

And that seemed to be what she was listing happening. Slightly fancied up, but not crazy fancy versions of iceberg salads. So I think it was creeping back onto menus for a long time. I was amused by the accompanying recipe, which was for an iceberg with smoked bacon and buttermilk dressing, which to me was a very fancy way of saying bacon, bits and ranch. That's the kind of place I would definitely have described any mayonnaise as

aioli. I remember in that area, you couldn't put mayonnaise on a menu, it had to be described as aioli, whether it was an aioli or not. Kenji, I made your iceberg wedge with yogurt branch, crispy shallots and chili crisps. It was delicious. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, you can find a link to it on therecipepodcast.com. I'm always impressed by the way with how finished your recipes are when they get to me,

even when you say it's a work in progress. I should try that. Mine are like, here's this napkin I wrote it on. You know, yours always seem finished too. I guess you sometimes leave notes saying you might increase this, you might decrease that, et cetera. Yeah, I might deliberate. You don't deliberate mid-recipe like I do, but I do that so I can find my place next time.

I can remember what I was working on. So I've joked about being an ingredient household. You call for crispy fried shallots and I know you can buy them at a grocery store, but I never loved the way they taste. And I had some shallots, so I wanted to fry them, but I wasn't, I hadn't done it in a while and I burned them. The acrid smell was phenomenal. They are very prone to burning because they look, when you fry shallots, the

traditional way, you put shallots in oil and then as you cook them, you're stirring them and then they look perfect in the pan, but then as you take them out, they continue to fry, even if you drain the oil from them. And so they go really quickly from being like perfectly golden brown to being kind of black and burned. And so fried shallots, you gotta time them so that you pull them off before they're done. But if they're slightly underdone,

they don't crisp properly. So they are pretty tricky and that's something that I feel like even if you do it every day, they're difficult to do. Well, thank you for making me feel better because that's exactly what I did. I'm like, oh, that's the color I want. Let me just go grab the sieve, some paper towels.

And now I came back and they're completely black and they smell terrible. However, the next time I got it right, I will say I don't love cutting everything with a mandolin, but I do feel like, because you really want those slices even, you really want to with it, or it's just, they're just,

the fatter pieces won't cook at the same time and you want to stir the whole time. And then when it just is like medium golden or just starting to hit medium golden, turn off the heat to give yourself time to finish crisping them. Have you seen the microwave method? There's a microwave method, Kenji.

Why are you telling me this now? It's um... I saw Sasha Marks who worked at Serious Eats. He now works at Chef Steps, but he previously worked at America's Test Kitchen, and I think he learned it there from a friend of ours, Andrew Janjigian, but essentially you take your sliced shallots and oil and put them in a microwave safe bowl

and then you just microwave the oil and shallots until they come out the right color. And it is less messy and more foolproof than doing them on the stove top. And it works surprisingly well whether you're doing shallots or garlic, fried shallots or fried garlic. Okay, I'm really happy to know this

and we should definitely, I'm glad you're telling everyone about it. I will know about it for next time. Right now, we do not have a microwave that's broken, but we're getting anyone soon. Well, the recipe that I sent you, it has the iceberg and then it has two sauces.

One of them is what I called like a yogurt ranch, which is based on the, I'm sure like the spicy Korean chili flake ranch dressing that I have in my book, The Walk, but that would be a very good place to use scallion oil in place of the right, because the recipe calls for mayonnaise and you make a homemade mayonnaise. I guess, I don't know if you made homemade mayonnaise

or if you just don't. No, I did not make homemade mayonnaise. See, like we found the limits of my ingredient. I'm not making mayonnaise, not for ranch dressing, please. All right. I just feel like the nuance of homemade mayo would be lost there for me personally, but if I was doing an aioli or something

where it was like very central, I would notice it. So the ranch dressing, it calls for fresh garlic and granulated garlic. And that's sort of one of the things that I find to be essential to ranch dressing is that there's that granulated garlic flavor and not just fresh garlic. If you use fresh garlic alone,

it has this kind of more pungent spicy garlic flavor, but there's a kind of sweetness, you know, to granulated garlic that I find to be sort of an essential part of ranch dressing flavor. If you make it with fresh mayo, you can leave out some of the lemon juice and some of the garlic because I'm, well, assuming that you're using the fresh mayo recipe

that I have, which already includes a little bit of garlic and lemon juice. Are you making ranch dressing with homemade mayo? I did, I made your ranch dressing and my ranch dressing both with homemade mayo. That's hardcore. I mean, I do like the idea of getting to use a nice delicately flavored oil,

but that granulated garlic, that I should use half as much powder, that it was less concentrated, like powder, garlic powder. Oh, if you're using straight up powdered garlic. I have garlic powder and onion powder, not granulated garlic and granulated onion. So I used half of each. Yes, because they're a little bit more powdered.

What I know now is granulated garlic is what I called garlic powder when I was younger. It's like if you go to the pizzeria, you know, and they have the shaker, like the salt shaker and the garlic shaker. We called that garlic powder, but it's actually what's sold as granulated garlic now. It's one of those things

that it often doesn't taste like much. And I'm not one of those people who thinks you need to throw away your spices every six months or a year, but I would definitely say that garlic and onion powder are not something with a long shelf life. Like if you find it, if you open a jar you haven't used in a while, it probably tastes more like dust. I date my spices by what music was coming out at the time that I bought it. These Thai prickly ash peppercorns are from when OK Computer came out. Wow. The album's still good, so the spices must still be good, right?

I don't know. It really depends. But then there's other things. I have a jar of, I think it's called Pearl Sugar. It's like that white crunchy sugar from Scandinavia. That goes into Belgian pancakes. Exactly. It's like that white crunchy sugar from Scandinavia. That goes into Belgian pancakes. Exactly, it's so good. I think I got my jar in, I shouldn't say this,

but it might've been 2010. What's wrong with it? It doesn't smell off or taste weird. No, sugar doesn't go bad. It has no smell. Nobody's eating my kitchen ever again after I tell them that. I'm like, it's like as old as my child who's in high school, it's fine.

So please know that when somebody cleans out my stuff, like my kids do, they're gonna say the same thing and make fun of me. When we go on trips, I like to buy ingredients, you know? And the other day, just yesterday actually, I was looking for some vinegar for your recipe, some red, red vinegar, and on the shelf that I have red wine vinegar,

I also have this jar of pumpkin seed oil, roasted pumpkin seed oil, that I got from a trip we took to Austria when our daughter was born. So 2017. It's been opened in half use. It's totally rancid now. It's unusable. But in the time that we took that trip, like my pumpkin seed oil has gone rancid. And you've had a whole other child. And we have had a whole other child. Like a whole other person has entered this earth. So don't feel bad about the pumpkin

seed oil. So back to your ranch, you use cilantro in your ranch instead of dill, parsley. I mean, what are the typical herbs used in a ranch dressing? If I was making like a real classic ranch, I think the flavorings I would use are buttermilk, dill, chives, garlic, including garlic powder, plenty of black pepper. And then MSG, I think is kind of like really an important flavor component in ranch dressing. If you taste like Hidden Valley Ranch,

you know, if you taste ranch out of the jar, like a big component of that flavor is the MSG. That makes sense. I actually did not pick up MSG, but I have no quibble or qualms with it. I just was too lazy to go to the store and pick it up. So you use cilantro and not dill, not parsley, not chives. Just in this particular recipe.

So in this particular recipe, you end up pairing it with a roast of chili oil, and then you sprinkle the whole salad with scallions and cilantro. I remember when I was chopping up the cilantro, I was like, I don't think I'm going to like this in this dressing. Like, it's going to be weird to me. I can't picture it. And we loved it.

I really minced it up. Like I really gave it like a kind of garlic kind of mince, but I loved how it gave it a, almost a green tint and it was delicious in there. It was so good. Another interesting thing about your dressing is that you actually don't use buttermilk in it. You use a mix of full frac Greek yogurt and mayonnaise.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of that is one of these decisions where it was, I wanted to make the recipe something where I knew people would have the ingredients on hand. You could of course make it with buttermilk, but yeah, in this particular recipe, I use yogurt in place of buttermilk.

It's a buttermilk and I love the flavor in a dressing, but it's a much thinner dressing. I mean, I sometimes buy buttermilk that's a little thicker in the container, but in general, it thins it out a lot. And that's why I usually do a combination of buttermilk and mayo, you really need that thickener in there. But honestly, I think people will probably really appreciate that it uses yogurt,

many more people are gonna keep yogurt around than buttermilk. You can always thin it out with like a little water or thin it out with a little skim milk or regular milk. If you want it more of that sort of pourable consistency. So for yours, we're gonna use this mix of yogurt mayonnaise. We've got some powdered garlic, powdered onion, fresh garlic, which did give it a nice bite,

minced up cilantro, some lemon juice, I didn't have the MSG, but you can add it, and lots of black pepper. It was delicious. I loved how it was just really popping with flavor, and it was really nice with, I used some chili crisp, so it had both the oil and the crunchy bits, and it was really nice against that, like we wolfed it down.

Then you put the whole, you put it together with radishes, cherry tomatoes, sweet fried shallots, and some fresh scallions that you've thinly sliced. And it was just incredible together. I loved it. Chili oil, like chili crisp and yogurt, which is something I love doing on all kinds of dishes. In my book, there's a recipe for a cucumber salad

with yogurt and chili oil that has some other ingredients as well. I think it's great with meatballs, it's great with little dumplings. Just that combination of yogurt and chili oil, I find to be really tasty in a wide variety of things. And so that was sort of the inspiration for the salad. I think of iceberg wedges as,

as long as you sort of think of the components, you have that crispy chunk of iceberg, right? You need some sort of creamy dressing, right? And then you have a bunch of other texture elements that you add to you. You have your crunchy vegetables, your fresh vegetables, generally you're going to have some sort of pop of flavor, whether it's a little

drizzle of vinegar. Like in your recipe, you call for drizzling the leaves with a little bit of vinegar before you put on the dressing. Like in my case, it's the chili oil at the end. And then you have some kind of crunchy topping, right? Could be breadcrumbs.

I use fried shallots in mine. But I think as long as you have all those components, you can kind of mix up the flavors of them and end up with something that's going to be, I think it's just a good salad to riff on. I'm glad you got that vinegar drizzle in there because I realized that I was telling you that one of my issues with wedges is that,

I mean, I love them and I will order them every time I see them on a menu. I don't care if I just had a wedged salad yesterday or it's not gonna be a good one. Like I will always order it. I always want my fork and knife salad. But the dressing is so thick that I think it actually goes better. And I did this when I made yours. I spread at least half of it on the plate itself. Uh-huh. Yeah. Like with the back of a spoon kind of sprawled around

and then you can kind of land the lettuce in there and then you're picking it up from the bottom rather than trying to get it to pour into the cracks which it's not really going to do that well. Then I just kind of dollop some on but most of it is getting evenly dressed from what's underneath. And then I love to put a little sprinkle

of red wine vinegar over some kind of vinegar. You could use a cider vinegar too, but I feel like it really gives it that bite, that pop. You're getting it from the chili oil, but I feel like it's sometimes missing in a creamy dressing that you don't get the right level of acidity to cut through it. So I made your recipe also.

I made your classic recipe from your first cookbook. Oh, so you made the stack. The stack, yeah. So I was gonna say that your recipe, so it's an example of a very classic, a classic iceberg wedge that is, I think the dressing is extremely well balanced. A lot of similar ingredients in fact,

but a very well balanced dressing. But you know, what I think, what I thought was interesting about your recipe is that it addresses one of the issues I have with iceberg wedges, which is the same issue that I have with piled nachos, which is that only the top nachos get all the toppings. So when you serve an iceberg wedge the traditional way,

it's like you drizzle, you ladle on your dressing and then you sprinkle it with maybe your bacon bits or whatever your crunchy stuff is in your vegetables. But then most of the stuff ends up falling and you kind of have to precariously cut through each piece and then sort of add other ingredients to it, add ingredients on a bite per bite basis to make sure that you have a balanced bite each time.

What your recipe does in your book is rather than leaving it in wedge form, you slice the heads of lettuce kind of horizontally into discs that are stacked. And in between each stack, you top, you dress it separately. You put a little of dressing, you sprinkle on your toppings

and then you stack the next layer. And so in the same way that like tray nachos, when you build your nachos on a tray stack by stack and you put all the toppings in between each layer before you bake it, I think it comes out more like that where everything, it still has the feel of eating an iceberg wedge because you still need a knife and a fork to eat it.

But the ingredients are organized in a way, architecturally in a way that I think makes the salad a lot better to eat. I'm glad you appreciated that too. I also, you do get a lot more of the toppings in each bite with less work. You're not scooping it up. It is kind of funny. We love these wedges, but they make no architectural sense. Like it doesn't take an advanced degree or, you know, a lot of culinary

practice to realize that you can't put things on a wedge. They're just going to fall to the bottom and you're going to be scooping them up all the time. Well, I'm glad you liked it. I don't limit my wedges though to blue cheese dressing. In fact, you don't have, you're not, you're really doing more of a classic ranch. I'm doing a blue cheese in that one, but usually for my blue cheese dressings, I have the blue cheese outside the dressing, which is just my own preference where I prefer crumbled on separately. And then the backdrop is kind of a blue cheese branch. So in the testing of all these recipes, we've been eating a lot of iceberg

salad at home and the kids haven't gotten sick of icebreak. Well, my son doesn't eat iceberg lettuce period, but my daughter has not gotten sick of iceberg salad yet, but she has gotten sick of blue cheese. And so this't eat iceberg lettuce period, but my daughter has not gotten sick of iceberg salad yet, but she has gotten sick of blue cheese. And so this last one worked out that we had yesterday because we had the blue cheese on the side and you could sprinkle as you go. That's in part why I do it.

It's great for the people at the table who don't like blue cheese. I'm impressed you have any kids that would consider eating blue cheese. My sons come around to it. My daughter doesn't wanna touch it, but she doesn't mind the dressing. But it was in part that, but it was also that

I already feel like the dressing is too thick to pour. And when you put it in, and if you put in like nice big chunks, it just kind of clogs the whole thing up where you have to pour a lot on because of the chunks. Anyway, so I prefer to scatter it on with the crunchy stuff. So you can really get a taste of it with each bite without it making an already hard to pour

very thick dressing almost impossibly so. What challenge was there in this recipe? Because this seems, this is one of those recipes where it's a classic dish, right? I don't think either one of us particularly reinvented the wheel as far as recipes for iceberg wedges go. It's almost one of those dishes where if you try and change too much, it's just not gonna make sense.

Like it kind of is what it is, you know, and people either like it or they don't. Like how much tweaking is there to do in an iceberg wedge salad? Well, I mean, not every recipe is supposed to be a new version. I love iceberg wedges. Like I, as I said, I will always order them.

I always wanna eat them. They make me happy. So I'm not trying to change it, but I always felt that it had an architectural issue. And also this issue of the crunchy stuff kind of getting lost either in the dressing or there not being enough of it. And this allowed us to put a lot of it on. I think my only, I'm just looking over, it's been a while since this book was published. There's also some diced up celery in it. And that's just because I think more things need celery

in it. I love the crunch, the cold. I think it goes really well with it. And I loved how pretty it looked with all these like speckles, this confetti of color on top. I didn't want to reinvent it. I wanted to make it work better at the time. DBGB, which was a restaurant from Daniel Ballou that was on lower Bowery. I remember they served sausages there.

They did a lot of sausages and a lot of meat. I thought it was very clever that they served an iceberg salad as a thick disk. I'm pretty sure that's what inspired it because I was like, you fixed it. You fixed the wedge issue. That said, I love these classic flavors, but I don't need it to have these flavors. I've done southwestern ones with a ranch and avocado and black beans and stuff like that.

I've also done ones with that kind of carrot ginger dressing you might get at a sushi restaurant. That one is really great with scallions with some diced cucumber. Some avocado is really nice on there. We do like a chunky iceberg salad with cucumber and cherry tomatoes and carrot. And then you can finish it with black and white sesame seeds. So I don't, for me, it doesn't have to be these flavors. They're the classic ones, but I feel like any kind of creamy dressing goes really well against iceberg

and any kind of salad that's busy because you've already got your fork and knife out so you could add a lot more ingredients. The most delightful thing that came of making a bunch of iceberg salads, you know, yours and mine included. Oftentimes I find that once I combine our two recipes, like the leftover from our two recipes,

they gain something from each other. But what I found this time was I took the bacon bits that were in yours, you have some optional bacon bits in here. So I made some bacon bits and then I had the fried shallots from mine and I just combined bacon bits and fried shallots, all the leftover ones.

And so I ended up with maybe like a half pint of just this bacon bit and fried shallot mixture and it is delicious. It's awesome. Just like they're both of the crispy elements together and fried shallot mixture. And it is delicious. It's awesome. Just like they're both of the crispy elements together and they kind of co-mingle and you can kind of crunch them up and sprinkle them on salads and in soups and stuff. It's very good.

Like the best salad topping on earth. I'm now like, so like, could I make the bacon bits and use the rendered fat to cook the shallots? Can I do it too for? You might be able to. Yeah, if you strain it well, yeah. Yeah. I would eat that.

If you strain it. Bacon fat fried shallot. So those were our classic recipes for iceberg wedges. When we come back from the break, we're gonna talk about even more things you can do with iceberg, from stir frying to pickling to turning it into soup. All right, we'll be right back. We're back on the recipe with Kenji and Deb.

I think there are two other classic iceberg salad situations that you have. One of them is the side salad that you get at the start of a casual sushi restaurant meal, right, where you get like the lunch set and if you get like a bento set, you always get an iceberg salad with that carrot ginger dressing.

And I think that's pretty classic. And if you're in Seattle and you get teriyaki, it always comes with an iceberg salad with a sort of creamy mayonnaise, sweet mayo dressing. The sesame dressing that's a little creamy and has toasted ground sesame seeds in it and a little mayo, and then there's the carrot ginger dressing. They're both amazing.

Yeah, but iceberg salad, I think classic with casual Japanese food. Also an iceberg salad is, iceberg is what I would expect for a taco salad. Yes. Which is like a staple of my childhood, taco salads. Taco salad to me is when you have the, when you have a taco bar,

like all the fillings at like a kid's birthday party, taco bar at like a cafeteria. It childhood, taco salads. Taco salad to me is when you have a taco bar, like all the fillings at a kid's birthday party taco bar, like a cafeteria, a school cafeteria taco bar, and you just pile it on lettuce, and you crunch up a tortilla shell over it, and you eat it. I'm wondering, because I have a kind of, I'm just gonna drop the link,

because I published this recipe last year, but it was styled on the kind of side salad I would sometimes get at taco places. And it basically has the pickled onions and the cotija. And I basically, I do something fun with the pepitas where I toast them in oil and then you pour that over and then it has avocado. But I called it baby bread salad.

I love the salad so much. You sent me the recipe for that salad and I was wondering, there's no real dressing on it. It's the vinegar, it's the pickling vinegar and then it's the oil from the toasting pepitas. Exactly, yeah, so there's no separate dressing which I was like, am I missing the creaminess? But then I looked at the recipe and it's like,

oh no, it gets its vinegar from there and it gets the oil from the pepitas so it must be, kind of balances itself out on it's like a self-constructing dressing. It's deconstructed and also the cotija does a lot because I use the really salty crumbly one. So when you kind of blanket it with that and then the oil and the vinegar, it's just, it's so good.

Kenji, have you ever had marulli salata? I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. It's a Greek lettuce salad and it uses iceberg lettuce. It's incredibly refreshing. Basically, usually the iceberg is ribbons and it's tossed with feta, dill, garlic, oregano, lemon and scallions. And it is so good in the summer and it's so refreshing.

When you say ribbons, are you talking like tagliatelle-sized ribbons or pepadelli-sized ribbons or like shreddis-sized ribbons? Not shreddis. I've generally, when I've seen it and seen it at restaurants, I'm gonna think more like almost fettuccine with ribbons. Okay, okay.

It's strips of it, it's not mulched, it's not shredded, it's not in chunks. I'm sure every household makes it a little differently. That's just the way I've seen it the most often. So I would say even like quarter to maybe more of a half inch wide ribbon. And it's so good. So when you toss it together,

it can almost look a little bit like noodle-y, but it definitely does not taste like noodles. It's really good. So I feel like it's a very classic salad that uses iceberg. You don't eat Greek food and you haven't grown up in a Greek household, it may not come up as much, but it's very popular because it's very good. And then there's also, I guess the next most classic use for iceberg is in the wonderful, it's got to be an American creation called shreddis. Kenji, what is shreddis?

Shredded lettuce. Shreddis. But it's, we say shreddis, but it's almost always iceberg, right? Yeah, it's gotta be, it's shredded iceberg lettuce. It's like when you work at a fast food restaurant, you get it in bags and you pile it on things. It's like what goes on a Big Mac, you know?

It's what goes into an Italian hoagie. I think, I mean, shreddis I, is an essential, an essential sandwich topping. Yeah, you have it in wraps and tacos. In burgers, yeah. That essential juicy crunch. It's the juicy crunch, it's the way it traps other ingredients. So like in an Italian hoagie,

it traps the vinaigrette in a hamburger, it traps the hamburger juices as they drip down. They trap the ingredients and also how the texture that they add and as well as being a sort of stabilizing form in sandwich structure. You know, like oftentimes you wanna make sure that your layers don't slip and slide past each other. And shreddice I think is a way of like offering

that cradle at the base of the sandwich that makes sure that the top layers don't kind of slide off the bottom bun. It's a little bit like a slaw, but it's, I mean, minus the creamy dressing, but I don't always make slaws with the creamy dressing. It has like a slaw effect, but it's a little bit more, I'd say like chompable.

Chompable, yeah. It's not as aggressive as cabbage. I think it's also maybe that it's like, it's volume, but it's compressible volume. So like it makes your burger look full, but then as you bite down on it, compresses so that you don't have to snake try to get all the stuff in.

Kenji, did you try my pickled iceberg in your preparation for the show? I didn't. I'm harassing you. No, the recipe looks great. And pickled iceberg is definitely a thing that people seem to enjoy. It's funny, cause I feel like I'd never seen it before outside

of my mother-in-law's table. So just to explain, pickled iceberg is, it's really just a quick fridge pickle. You can do it with vinegar, garlic, dill, however you like to do your fridge pickles, and my mother-in-law always makes it cheap, does it with the leaves soaking in it, they're like whole leaves that she might've torn, but it's basically like a fork and knife pickle in case this isn't abundantly clear. My in-laws are Russian and there's always pickles at the table.

There's multiple kinds of pickles. It's always part of the meal. There's always several in the fridge. And I always loved it. At the table, we would just eat it with a fork and knife, maybe with some sort of salty cured fish and black bread and whatever stuff you're gonna start the meal with. But every time I ate it, I just thought,

I think this is what every sandwich is missing. Like every sandwich that you're putting both lettuce and a pickle on, this is both and better. Does it stay crunchy? It stays crunchy? It's semi-crunchy. Like sauerkraut crunchy or? I feel like sauerkraut's a little softer.

This is a quick pickle, not like a long fermented one. It stays crunchy the way a pickle is crunchy. My worry is that it would get slimy that like that wilty iceberg ends up with a slimy texture. I feel like the vinegar keeps it from having that slippery texture. No. And also I feel like the thinner parts of the iceberg are very few and far between most of it has that kind of central crunch to it,

each layer, and that pickles up beautifully. Again, it's a little odd, but I promise if you try it, like imagine putting that like on an egg salad sandwich or even like a regular turkey sandwich. But in the book, I do a BLT with it. So I did not pickle the lettuce as you told me I should, but did you stir fry the lettuce as I suggested to you? No, but I still might do it with this other head tonight. In your book, The Block, you have a recipe for a stir fried Napa cabbage, which is honestly something I'm probably craving almost every day.

It sounds so good. Okay, yeah, yeah. It's quick stir fry, so it sounds like you're gonna get to retain some of the crunch of the Napa cabbage, but you mentioned that you can use iceberg instead, and I, it was on the agenda. I just didn't get to it, but you know, there's still time. Yeah.

It's a stir-fried iceberg or steamed iceberg with oyster sauce, something like that. Really good. The same way Napa cabbage gets that kind of, it's kind of wet, but crunchy at the same time. I don't know how to describe it. That doesn't sound wet and crunchy. It doesn't sound great, but.

It softens, but retains some structure. Wet and crunchy sounds like a novelty snack food from the 80s. But when we say cooking, people think cooking to death. You don't have to murder the lettuce when you're cooking with iceberg. You don't have to murder it. Have you ever made lettuce soup?

Yes, both like pureed styles, you know, which come out kind of really nice and creamy. And also I like putting lettuce either shredded or just very gently poached at the end of soups, especially like Chinese soups very commonly you put lettuce in at the end. A noodle soup with lettuce in it is really good I think. I'm much more interested in the idea

of dropping it in at the end so it can get warmed up but not mushy. I think it would be a really nice. I like soups with a lot of contrast at the end so that sounds really good to me. Have you ever seen, and I feel like, I don't know if it went viral or if it was from a food magazine

or it was just on Instagram. It was a sandwich that was kind of having a moment, maybe a couple summers ago, and it had a big wedge, like a good, not wedge, a one inch plank of iceberg in the middle. Like it was an iceberg dominant sandwich. Not iceberg as the bread. Like an iceberg slab sandwich. Yeah, it was an iceberg dominant sandwich. Not iceberg as the bread. Like an iceberg slab sandwich.

Yeah, it was an iceberg, I wanted to make it. I never did it, now I can't find it. It seems to have. I think that could be really good like on just like plain white sandwich bread. Wouldn't that be really nice in the summer with all the things you might put. Yeah, with mayo.

And a good wedge, yeah, a good wedge. But you could use your ranch as the dressing. You could do that little shake of vinegar. You know, you could put some pepperoncini on it. Like you could put something with a real kick to balance it. I would definitely eat it. Have you seen the TikTok trend

of like just chopping a bunch of crap up and putting it in a sandwich and calling it a chopped salad sandwich? I find it very unsettling. I don't want to eat mulch. I just feel like every bite would taste exactly the same and you would lose the distinction between the ingredients. Can you waffle iceberg? I've never tried it. No. I can see it maybe as like if you did it in like an okonomiyaki batter, like a Japanese

pancake batter. Okay. I've w waffle that, maybe that would work, but I don't see that it would be better than say just cabbage. Can you taco iceberg? Obviously we wanna put it inside our tacos. I guess you could use it instead of the tortilla, but I feel like it's the filling. I want it in my tacos.

I always imagine, yeah, if I had a flour tortilla that's warm and then like a big pile of shredded iceberg on the inside. Almost like it was like the sort of the equivalent of like a Vietnamese like summer roll, you know, where you have like greens inside a wrapper that are sort of compressed. See, I'm picturing like a nice black bean taco

with a nice saucy black bean. And then of course I'm gonna say, I wanna pickle the iceberg and shred it up with some pickled onions. And I want that to be the topping with some crema and avocado. That does sound good. Can you fry it in butter in a pan?

Uh, yes. It may not be better for it and it's very rare that things are not better when fried in butter. I feel like I need to try this now, like to slice it and sear a slab of iceberg. Like if you could do it fast enough that the rest of it stays crunchy. It's just not an appealing sounding thing though. No. No. It definitely leftovers.

I mean, it's still gonna keep better without dressing on it, but it's gonna keep better than most lettuces. And then I think our bonus question is, does it come out of kids clothes easily? But I think we're safe on iceberg. Although I wouldn't put it past my kids to find a way to stain their clothing.

To get it in. With iceberg. But since at least one of them listens to this podcast, Although I wouldn't put it past my kids to find a way to stain their clothing with ice spray. But since at least one of them listens to this podcast, I do not want to put this challenge out into the world. Can we do like a special section of the episode for people with mesophonia? I've had a knife and a cutting board and a head of lettuce here. Well, while Deb crunches up that iceberg, if there's another recipe or food you want us to chat about, you can tell us at therecipepodcast.com or at Kenji and Deb. And we now have a phone number where you can call us.

It's 202-709-7607 and you can leave us a voicemail. The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Jay Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Perry Gregory, and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions. Edwin Ochoa is the project manager. The executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Mardovich, and Yori Lissardo is the director of network operations. Cher Delva, Apu Gotay, Emmanuel Johnson, and Mike Russo handle our social media.

See you next time. Thanks for listening. The recipe with Kenji and Deb is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm.