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Chopped Salad with Apples, Bacon, and Turkey

Source of Recipe

From "The Best Simple Recipes" by America's Test Kitchen


Recipe Introduction

"When it comes to chopped salads, the results can often seem like an afterthought, with a huge assembly of ingredients that suggests whatever was in the refrigerator got thrown into the bowl. We exercise restraint here and rely on just a handful of ingredients to provide texture and flavor, and we use a full-flavored blue cheese dressing to pull it all together. For blue cheese flavor in every bite, we whisk half of the cheese into the vinaigrette and add the remaining cheese just before serving."

List of Ingredients

◦ 1 cup crumbled blue cheese, room temperature
◦ � cup extra-virgin olive oil
◦ 2 tablespoons cider vinegar
◦ Salt and pepper
◦ 8 slices bacon, chopped
◦ 2 romaine hearts, chopped
◦ 2 apples, cored and cut into �-inch cubes
◦ 8 ounces thick-cut deli smoked turkey breast, cut into �-inch pieces


Recipe

Whisk � cup cheese, oil, vinegar, � teaspoon salt, and � teaspoon pepper in large bowl until smooth and creamy.

Cook bacon in large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat until crisp, about 5 minutes. Transfer to paper towel-lined plate.

Add lettuce, apples, turkey, bacon, and remaining cheese to bowl with dressing and toss to combine. Season with salt and pepper. Serve.

Serves 4






❧ Smart shopping�precrumbled versus block cheese:

The precrumbled blue cheese found in the deli section seems like a convenient shortcut to buying a solid block that you have to crumble yourself, but we wondered how the flavor stacks up. We tasted blue cheese (as well as goat, feta, and gorgonzola) precrumbled and in various recipes. Tasters found the precrumbled cheese fine in all cases. What wasn't OK was the price difference. Stella blue cheese that sells for $8 per pound in a block was $3.99 for a 5-ounce precrumbled package. Considering that precrumbled costs 160 percent more, we'd rather spend 30 seconds crumbling our own.