Divide salad among plates (or serve on a platter if you like). Combine the rice wine or sherry, soy sauce, sugar, and salt in a small bowl. Box 638 Bantam, CT 06750. A lake for everyone, confessions of a pool crasher, and the BBQ king of California. Whisk together tangerine juice, tangerine zest, sea salt, and olive oil. All Rights Reserved. 55 days. “It’s got a terrific mouth-feel,” he says, with leaves that are crunchy at the center and velvety at the ends, with great grooves in the leaves that allow the lettuce to hold its own with other ingredients. Red Butterhead Lettuce and Arugula Salad with Tangerines and Hard-Cooked Eggs. Greenburg says he did a side-by-side taste test of farmers market lettuce versus hydroponic. Butter lettuce appears under several different names -- Boston lettuce, bibb, butterhead, limestone. Set the orange pieces aside. Add tangerines and croutons; toss just to mix. Toss; season … In a bowl, toss the butter lettuce with the vinaigrette, then divide among four plates. 4 ounces top-quality feta cheese, crumbled into ⅛ -inch pieces, Mixed Melons With Rosewater Granita and Pistachios, Goat Cheese With Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Caramelized Garlic, Rehydrating Dry-Packed Sun-Dried Tomatoes, Once-Baked Mashed Potatoes With Fried Sage Skins, Very Slow-Roasted Yams With Seven-Herb Sauce, Butter-Crisped Turkey With Roasted Bread Salad, Dry-Fried Green Beans and Mushrooms With Sizzled Onions. Scrub the beets and trim the stems. To enjoy its ephemeral sweetness and texture, make sure Lettuce grows quickly: water it frequently and fertilize weekly with fish emulsion or manure tea. As much as it can be a canvas for the chef’s imagination, it actually requires very little to be table-worthy -- a splash of good olive oil, a drop of vinegar, a few grains of salt. Rinse and dry arugula and red butterhead lettuce. You must have JavaScript enabled in your browser to utilize the functionality of this website. It’s a market salad, with leaves of fresh Coleman Farms red butter lettuce looking as if Peter Rabbit ran with a watercolor brush through the garden rows. Hydroponic or fresh from the farmers market, butter lettuce is a perennial classic. A far cry from its wild, weedy ancestors, Lettuce now appears in all shapes, textures, flavors and sizes, bringing healthy crunch to modern kitchens. Heat a 14-inch flat-bottomed wok over high heat until a bead of water vaporizes within … Using a paring knife, cut away the skin and any pith. Put in a serving bowl and toss gently but thoroughly with only enough dressing to coat. There’s a beautiful serenity in that. SUNSET is a registered trademark Copyright © 2020 Sunset Publishing Corporation. Top each salad with one-fourth of the feta. You may substitute regular butter lettuce. “Texture’s very important in a one-lettuce salad,” says Ben Ford of Ford’s Filling Station, who has a jazzy BLT-inspired butter lettuce salad. Sweeney uses Cowgirl Creamery feta. In addition to the tangy feta, there are cool, fresh mint leaves, salty toasted pistachios and velvety golden beets, with pieces of blood orange helping marry the flavors and adding zing. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our, 6 cups red butterhead lettuce (about 1/2 head), loosely packed, 2 large or 4 small tangerines, cut into chunks. Whether hydroponic lettuce tastes any different depends on whom you talk to: Growers and sellers tend to split according to the product they have. It’s butter lettuce’s texture that chefs uniformly praise. of Sunset Publishing Corporation. Drizzle with a splash of the vinaigrette and set aside. They’ve shown up on menus at places as different as Tower Bar, Ammo, Grace and Jar in L.A., and at Biggs in Long Beach. In a small bowl, mix together the shallot, lemon juice, orange juice and olive oil. JavaScript seem to be disabled in your browser. Butter lettuces can withstand some wear and tear, especially if you buy them in hydroponic form -- grown, that is, in nutrient-rich solutions instead of actual soil. Average seed life: 3 years. Amy Scattergood is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times Food section and a former member of the Food reporting team. Direct-seed from the spring through the late summer. We’ve spotted butter lettuce salads everywhere -- the landmark Campanile, the new Ford’s Filling Station in Culver City and eat. He found that the difference in flavor was actually quite small, but that the hydroponic lettuce stayed pristine so much longer that the choice was a clear one. At Biggs in Long Beach, chef Seth Greenburg uses hydroponic butter lettuce in a salad with watercress, Point Reyes blue cheese, thin slices of silky ripe pear, smoked almonds and a rich vinaigrette made with roasted cipolline onions. Habitat Flower Garden Planting Instructions, Tips for Harvesting and Storing Root Vegetables, Harvest-Time Tips for Globe Onions and Garlic, Tips for Harvesting and Storing Pumpkins and Winter Squash, Sweet Potatoes: The Vegetable Garden's Superfood, Rich Zesty Buttermilk Blue Cheese Dressing, 23 Tulip Drive P.O. Harvesting a head of Yugoslavian Red Butterhead is like unwinding a T-shirt after you've tie-dyed it. For baby greens, sow thickly and harvest with scissors or raise transplants, plugging seedlings into empty spaces in your garden as they become available. Working over a wide bowl, cut segments out of the orange, slicing as close to the membranes as possible. Cook them in boiling water for about 15 minutes, or until crisp-tender. Season to taste with salt and pepper. As you pull away the deep brick-red-dipped leaves, the blanched, pale yellow-green interior is revealed with an astounding contrast that is dramatic and wonderful. Greenburg loves the way butter lettuce eats. Get fresh recipes, wine pairings, weekend getaway ideas, regional gardening tips, home design inspiration, and more. Season to taste with … Place the dish on a windowsill or under grow lights. He notes that butter lettuce has a good amount of flavor and holds up to the dressing he pairs it with, a heady bacon-shallot vinaigrette that he uses almost like a dipping sauce. Now it seems that every restaurant in town has a salad of butter lettuce. Hellmann's® or Best Foods® Light Mayonnaise, garlic powder, tomatoes and 4 more. Change the water every one to two days so the … Divide salad among plates (or serve … It has a beautiful purity, which is perhaps one reason why it’s getting more attention lately than its fancier cousins. But it’s all the same thing: delicate in flavor, clean and only vaguely crunchy, and enormously versatile. Cool, then peel and cut into quarter-inch wedges. Which is comforting, really, as some salad greens are so fragile that you have to treat them like fine silk instead of food. Do not overcook. Save some of the juice for the dressing. Serve immediately. “Melted” tomatoes (Romas roasted in olive oil) and shaved hard-boiled eggs are the salad’s other components. Tender and almost creamy in texture, articulated like a large open rose, butter lettuce is a salad classicist’s dream -- substantial enough to carry (literally) the compositional weight of the other ingredients, yet subtle enough to blend into the background when needed. Cut the onions in 1/2 and slice 1/4-inch thick, place on a baking sheet and toss with: Her salad incorporates Cowgirl Creamery feta and blood-orange vinaigrette. The varieties we offer are beautiful, reliable and usually not available in stores. Add tangerines and croutons; toss just to mix. From chef Amy Sweeney at Ammo. The buttery taste of the lettuce offsets the egg and bacon the same way brioche matches up to caviar. The red butter lettuce is different not only in color -- it’s also a little softer, with leaves that are more corrugated than the green variety. Sprinkle each with pistachios and mint. To broaden the range of texture and flavor in your garden and salads, don't forget to plant some of these specialty Salad Greens: Arugula, Asian Greens, Chervil, Claytonia, Cress, Dandelion Greens, Endive, Escarole, Frisee, Giant Red Mustard, Komatsuna, Lettuce, Mache, Mibuna, Minutina, Mizuna, Orach, Radicchio, Salad Blends, Sorrel, Spinach, Swiss Chard, and Tatsoi. At Ammo, chef Amy Sweeney loves it too. Add one-fourth of the beets and oranges to each place. Peel the blood oranges. Discard the outer leaves of the lettuce. on sunset in Hollywood. Preparation. Butter lettuce is more durable than it looks, and won’t wilt as soon as it comes into contact with dressing. And Sweeney is certain that it’s slightly more flavorful than the green kind. In a small bowl, mix together the shallot, lemon juice, orange juice and olive oil. Wash with cold water and spin dry. Maybe they’d had just one too many plates of mizuna or mesclun, but sometime last summer, chefs began putting butter lettuce on restaurant menus as if they’d just discovered the stuff.