simplest tricolore salad
Nearly every day of my life I am presented with some banal reminder of a way in which I have failed: forgetting to do something I procrastinated, experiencing some new papercut of rejection, gently being nudged by my Apple Watch to stop neglecting my rings, seeing blood in the sink when spitting out toothpaste.
But I can survive as long as my failure rating doesn’t exceed a certain threshold. I manually improve my hit rate by doing things I know I am unlikely to screw up.
Inspired by the salads I happily pay $18 for at Italian restaurants, tricolore salad is part of the proud “loose representations of the Italian flag” tradition that brings us caprese salad and margherita pizza. The dressing is so simple to make that there’s truly no excuse even for me not to: it’s olive oil whisked together with red wine vinegar, salt, and a tiny bit of whole grain dijon. The chopping of the vegetables is a weirdly cathartic task. The shaved parm is something I buy already shaved that way from the Whole Foods cheese section so that I don’t have to engage with the intimidating brick of it unless I want to, but you can of course use grated or shredded or do it yourself—whatever is easiest for you. I often serve tricolore with a panko-chicken cutlet, which makes this pretty much a chicken milanese with a different salad.
But what’s important about it is that you won’t screw it up. You can’t. The Italian flag flies proud, failings and all, with utmost confidence in what its country has to offer. And that’s sometimes the energy that, on a day where anything you do seems destined to splatter at your feet, has the power the soothe the soul better than any soup you could possibly make.
recipe
A classic Italian tricolore salad is an incredibly simple yet also very fancy way to elevate literally everything (pasta, grilled steak, fried chicken) to true Italian Elite status, with a bright n zesty homemade vinaigrette that keeps even the most assertive greens from getting too bitter.
Total time: 10 minutes
Effortful time: 10 minutes
Makes 4 salads, but we definitely eat all of them as two people
YOU NEED
For the salad
1 small head radicchio, about 4” in diameter
3 heads of endive; these are sold in my store in a package near the salad greens
2-3 oz. baby arugula
1/2 cup shaved parm reggiano
Freshly cracked black pepper, to taste.
For the dressing
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tsp. red wine vinegar
1/4 tsp of whole grain dijon mustard
Pinch of salt
make it
Prep the radicchio. Cut the radicchio head in half and slice out the core. Chop each half into two wedges down the middle where the core once was. Then slice thinly across the wedges so you get short pieces. Throw these into a salad bowl.
Prep the endive. Cut in half and again remove the cores; they will be much smaller cores than the one from the radicchio. Chop these into half moons and add to the bowl.
Make it a salad. Add your arugula, parm, and pepper. Give this one toss, undressed.
Build your dressing. In a small measuring cup (these are my all time favorite for dressings), whisk together the olive oil, vinegar, dijon, and salt. The oil and vinegar will initially reject each other, but the whisking + the dijon will help them reconcile.
Combine and toss. Pour your dressing over the salad and toss well. This works beautifully with a panko-crusted chicken cutlet like in this recipe for chicken milanese.