Bacon, Tomato, and Blue Cheese Main Course Salad

Bacon is Never a Bad Thing, Right?

I eat a lot of salads, which comes as a surprise to no one who knows me. But when I refer to something as a salad, I’m not talking about what most people think of when they hear the word salad. For instance, last night I cut up a cantaloupe into chunks, sprinkled it with tajin (chili and lime seasoning) and served it with a pan pizza I made. I think of that cantaloupe as a salad. It was fresh, crisp, icy cold, sweet, and tart from the seasoning – just what I want in a salad.

But the recipe I’m posting today is indeed a salad in both the classic sense and Renée sense. Classic in that it has lettuce, tomatoes, etc., but treated in such a way that is so satisfying it stands on its own as a main course.

First of all, there’s bacon, a whole lot of bacon. This salad serves 4 people as a main course and I used a pound of bacon. If the salad is going to leave you feeling fully satiated, you need plenty of bacon, right? At least, that’s how I see it. My favorite way to cook this much bacon is to do it on a sheet pan in the oven. You can cook a whole pound, not contend with greasy cleanup, and it cooks evenly.

While the bacon is cooking, I did something with the tomatoes that I’ve been doing for quite awhile. I got it from Kenji Lopez-Alt. In this case, I used Compari tomatoes because summer is over and I think they are one of the few tomatoes worth buying this time of year. After quartering the tomatoes, I place them in a strainer, toss with a teaspoon of salt, and let them drain for a half hour until the bacon is done. This drains off enough liquid from the tomatoes so that they don’t water down the salad and the tomatoes are fully seasoned. A great deal of the salt is drained away with the liquid, so you don’t need to be concerned about them being too salty. They’re not. They just end up being perfectly seasoned, which greatly enhances their flavor.

With the bacon in the oven and the tomatoes draining, I whisked together a very simple dressing of tomato vinegar ,* red wine vinegar, salt, pepper, a pinch of sugar, and good olive oil. If you don’t have tomato vinegar, use all red wine vinegar, but Mutti makes a tomato vinegar * that isn’t too expensive, packs a ton of tomato flavor, and I highly recommend it.

I chose romaine lettuce because it’s substantial enough to support the other ingredients and also because I was craving a chopped salad. Romaine or iceberg are the only lettuces I use for chopped salads. Other greens are too delicate and the romaine happened to look particularly good at the market. I added sliced scallions, tossed the salad with some of the dressing and plated it. Crumbled blue cheese went on top, along with all the bacon, which I had roughly crumbled. If blue cheese isn’t your thing, you can use whatever cheese you’d like, but the strong flavor of blue cheese happens to be superb here. 

Then I sprinkled crisp fried shallots * on top of everything. I’ve mentioned before that I keep a jar of these on hand most all the time. Yes, you can make them yourself, but these are so handy and delicious I tend to not bother making them myself.

So, there you have it. A salad with familiar ingredients, but put together in a way that was absolutely delicious. As my son said, “Well, I could eat 3 plates of this.” But trust me, one plate is definitely filling and satisfying. Each and every bite brought a different texture and flavor. You could also add croutons, but I chose to serve it with a freshly baked focaccia to sop up the juices. A Renée Salad? Oh, yeah. In every respect.