Welcome the warmer weather with this hearty cobb salad with green onion vinaigrette. It combines hard-cooked eggs with spring vegetables.
This fully adaptable recipe can be adjusted to meet your tastes. As the seasons change, use goat cheese instead of blue cheese. You can also use butter lettuce with the romaine or swap out the radishes for cherry tomatoes.
It’s the kind of meal you can enjoy any time of the year.
Servings: 2 to 4
Ingredients
Dressing
- 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 1 green onion, roughly chopped
- 1 garlic clove, chopped
- 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
- 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
Salad
- 4 cups chopped romaine lettuce
- 1 cup baby spinach
- 2 to 3 hard boiled eggs, quartered
- 5 radishes, sliced
- 3 strips cooked bacon, finely chopped
- 1/4 small red onion, thinly sliced
- 4 tablespoons crumbled blue cheese
Preparation
Add all dressing ingredients to a single serve blender, and puree until the onion and garlic are very finely chopped and all ingredients are combined. Set aside.
Arrange the romaine in a serving bowl. Add the spinach in the center of the salad. Place the eggs in the center of the salad on top of the spinach.
Working in circular rows, layer the radishes, then the bacon, the red onion and finally the blue cheese. Combine the ingredients as you portion out servings.
Serve with the dressing on the side.
Read more: Grow your own salad greens for healthy, from-the-garden salad!
Sidebar: Cobbled Together
In David Burke’s New American Classics (2009), Chef Burke relates, “Legend has it that Cobb salad was invented by [Robert] Bob Cobb, the owner of the world-famous (and now defunct) Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles … It is said that the salad came about when Mr. Cobb needed to make a special presentation to a regular diner who had demanded ‘something made just for me.”
Apparently the kitchen had bits and pieces of cooked chicken and bacon, avocado and Roquefort cheese along with the necessary salad makings. Cobb used his artistry to put them together in a unique way.
In The Story Behind the Dish (2012), author Mark McWilliams wrote that “weary of the familiar items on the limited menu … Bob Cobb prepared himself a salad of chopped leftover chicken and some other ingredients for a late-night meal. The dish might have been a one-time experiment if some of the movie industry’s leading players had not stopped in.”
The Brown Derby had a reputation as a hot-spot for Hollywood celebrities. A few saw what Cobb was eating and ordered the same.
A theory also exists that Robert Kreis, the executive chef at the Brown Derby, created the salad in 1929 (the year the Brown Derby’s Hollywood location opened) and named it in honor of Cobb.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2021 issue of Chickens magazine.
