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Taste Greg Atkinson

Salad Days

With 'greens' in every shade, we've come a long way from iceberg

I was still in my teens when I had my first full-time job as a cook. The restaurant was at a ski lodge where we put out a couple of hundred lunches every day. At the end of each shift, I would write a prep list for the following morning, and at the top of almost every list were the words "Wash lettuce." Every morning I would come into the kitchen, fill the sink with water and start cutting lettuce for sandwiches and salads.

A few years later, as a college student, I was working as a dinner cook at a Mexican restaurant in Bellingham. There, the day cooks took care of most of the prep work. Every morning they would push wedges of iceberg through the feed tube of a Robot Coupe food processor, and the shredded lettuce would be waiting for us dinner cooks when we arrived.

After I was graduated from college, I became the chef at a French café on San Juan Island, and once again I was writing out prep lists. But this time, the greens to prep for salads were the most interesting edible leaves I could find. In the spring and summer, local growers came to the back door with lettuces in varying shades from the dark-green arugula to the butter-yellow baby Bibb and crimson-streaked red Romaine. The lettuces were gently broken into individual leaves, bathed in cool water then spun dry. In winter, when local greens were unavailable, I ordered specialty greens such as watercress and Belgian endive from Charlie's Produce in Seattle.

Because ours was a small restaurant, we could seldom afford to pay a helper. So most nights, I had to rely on my own efforts. Washing lettuce was just one of 20 or 30 tasks on my list: strain stock, make bread dough, filet salmon, roast ducks, cut cauliflower, puree beets, make ice cream . . .

Some days the list seemed impossibly long. But my fellow cooks and I took pride in knowing that everything we served was made from scratch in our own kitchen.

Then sometime in the mid-1980s, my sales rep at Charlie's told me about pre-washed organic salad greens. The mix probably came from Earthbound Farm, the Carmel Valley-based company that introduced pre-washed salad greens on a large scale in 1986. Today, the company is the largest purveyor of organic produce in the world. But several other companies quickly followed suit, and I can't say for sure where the greens came from. All I knew was that they seemed like a godsend. Here were tiny white curls of frisee, swirls of red radicchio and spikes of emerald green mizuna tucked into an array of green and red oak leaf lettuces, all organically grown and ready to dress and serve. I was a happy camper.

I'm sure homemakers must have felt the same way when pre-washed greens appeared on grocery produce aisles. No more boring iceberg lettuce; now it would be easy to serve interesting salads every night, the same fancy salads found in small restaurants like the one where I worked. The salads were gorgeous and organic. And soon, even the local farmers who provided me with salad greens were offering pre-washed blends. So, why was I beginning to feel tinges of regret?

What had once been a rare specialty item, reflecting the care and devotion of local growers and cooks working together, was now a ubiquitous commodity. Mixed baby greens started showing up even in high-volume chain restaurants, and diners started grumbling about being forced to eat lawn clippings. Then came The Great Spinach Scare of 2006. Last Sept., 21 states reported outbreaks of food-borne illness related to pre-washed spinach. And for a moment it looked like the halcyon days that began in the mid-'80s were coming to a halt.

But if sliced bread was the greatest innovation of a previous generation, I'd say pre-washed salad greens count as one of the great improvements in this generation's groceries. What's more, I don't think they're going away any time soon.

Greg Atkinson is author of "West Coast Cooking." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Barry Wong is a Seattle-based freelance photographer. He can be reached at studio@barrywongphoto.com.

West Coast Mesclun Salad

with Baked Goat Cheese

Serves 4

In the last quarter of the 20th century when young cooks first started localizing elements of country French cooking, finding good salad greens presented an almost insurmountable hurdle. These days, the mixed baby greens known as mesclun are available ready-to-eat in most supermarkets, making what was once a labor of love into an easy-to-prepare element of any weeknight dinner.

8 ounces organically grown, pre-washed mixed baby greens

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 small (4-ounce or 6-ounce) log fresh white goat cheese

For the vinaigrette

1 finely chopped shallot

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

2 tablespoons white or red wine vinegar

6 tablespoons fruity green olive oil

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1. Put the greens in a salad bowl, cover with a damp paper towel and refrigerate until serving time.

2. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Drizzle the olive oil onto a small baking sheet and cut the log of cheese into four rounds. Place the cheese rounds on the oiled baking sheet and turn them once so each one is coated top and bottom with the oil. Pop the cheese rounds into the oven and let them bake until they are heated through, about 5 minutes.

3. While the cheese is baking, make the vinaigrette. Whisk together the shallot, mustard and vinegar; then, still whisking, drizzle in the olive oil. Toss the salad greens with the vinaigrette. Sprinkle kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper over the dressed greens and distribute them evenly among four salad plates.

4. With a spatula, carefully transfer the hot goat cheese to the center of each salad and serve at once.

Greg Atkinson, 2007

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