Today’s temperature in Nashville, Tennessee as I post this at 6:34pm CST: 94 degrees and feels like 104 degrees (official report!). Let’s eat something cold, really cold like a chilled iceberg wedge with a frozen blue cheese dressing.
A cold blast-from-the-past with an updated twist.
As you know blue-cheese dressing is a must for this salad, but frozen blue-cheese ice cream dressing is even better!
I had a version of this salad while working on a photo shoot in Florida a few years ago. It was late in the day, I was hot & tired. I walked to a nearby restaurant close to my hotel for dinner at the end of the day. I lazily chose the “classic wedge salad” and when it arrived at my table the dressing was frozen….a blue-cheese ice cream dressing right on the top of my wedge slowly melting down into & between the leaves. Ingenious.
A good blue cheese with lots of veins….yogurt…hot sauce…my homemade lemon-salt and…….
….a generous grinding of my friend Jesse (Food Sheriff) Goldstein’s very own invention “Flower Pepper”. To be more exact “Uncle Daisy’s Organic Flower Pepper”. Jesse gave me a jar of his special pepper chock full of dried flowers as a gift and it added just the right flavor to this recipe. It is not available in stores but you can make your own. Go to Jesse’s blog post that tells you how.
Ingredients blended together and frozen in my ice-cream freezer but left a bit soft to scoop onto the top of the wedge!
Pancetta cooked until very crisp and most of the fat rendered in my Lodge cast iron skillet.
Updated….Neo-Classic Iceberg Wedge Salad…for hot days to cool you down.
Neo-Classic Iceberg Lettuce Wedge Salad with Blue Cheese Ice Cream Dressing
Ingredients & Equipment:
Electric ice cream freezer ready to make ice cream according to package directions for your particular machine.
- 1 head of Iceberg Lettuce cut into 4 wedges, covered and chilled
- 1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes cut in half
- 6 ounces Pancetta (or thick bacon), diced and cooked until very crisp, well-drained
- 2 cups full-fat Greek yogurt
- 1 cup good quality blue cheese crumbled
- Lemon Salt (here is where you can learn how to make your own citrus salts)
- Flower Pepper (here is where to learn how to make your own), freshly ground
- Tabasco sauce or other hot sauce
Directions:
- In a bowl mix together Greek yogurt, blue cheese crumbles, a healthy pinch of lemon salt, a generous grinding of Flower Pepper and a few shakes of hot sauce to taste. Stir until well blended.
- Scrape mixture into the ice cream freezer and freeze according to package directions or until mixture is “ice cream frozen”. Scrape blue cheese ice cream dressing in a plastic container and pop in the refrigerator freezer while you prepare the salads. Don’t let the dressing get too frozen as it will be hard to scoop.
- On four plates place one Iceberg Lettuce wedge. Sprinkle tomato halves & crisp pancetta over the wedges.
- Add a scoop (or two) of Blue Cheese Ice Cream Dressing over each wedge right before serving.
Teresa Blackburn teresablackburnfoodstyling.com
