Mixt Salads: A Chef's Bold Creations [A Cookbook]

by Andrew Swallow, Ann Volkwein

Overview

Dare to get more out of your greens!
 
From healthy, superfood packed entrée salads to indulgent affairs featuring premium ingredients, this bold collection of more than 60 recipes for voracious omnivores and vivacious salad lovers features unusual and dynamic ingredient pairings that take salads to a whole new level.
 
In Mixt Salads, the co-founder and executive chef of San Francisco’s beloved boutique salad joints shares his inventive, flavor-forward creations. Blending all of the best trends in healthy, mindful eating—seasonal, locally grown, modest portions but big flavor—Swallow develops each entrée salad as if he were in the kitchen of a fine dining restaurant. With his penchant for innovative constructions and unabashed flavor, he reinvents the salad with playful yet elegant offerings.
 
Swallow teaches you how to create fresh, delicious, and addictive salads that take center stage as the entire meal, breaking free of side-dish status. Starting from scratch, he walks you through his salad-building essentials and highlights produce availability so that you can create your own imaginative masterpieces year round.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781580080576
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	04/27/2010
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	8.32(w) x 10.28(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

After working at Gramercy Tavern, ANDREW SWALLOW graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. He continued to develop his craft at fine restaurants including Ajax Tavern in Aspen and Huntley Tavern, and as a manager of Gary Danko. During his tenure there, Andrew decided to create a new eco-gourmet fast-casual option: Mixt Greens. Partnering with his sister and brother-in-law, Leslie and David Silverglide, the team launched the San Francisco Bay Area’s greenest restaurant in 2005. Mixt has since expanded to multiple locations across the country while still preserving its gutsy approach to salads, maintaining ecologically sound business practices, and retaining its original mandate of environmental sustainability. Swallow’s home base is in San Francisco.
 
ANN VOLKWEIN is a food and lifestyle writer and editor based in New York City and Austin, Texas. A former culinary producer for the Food Network, she has written several cookbooks.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION
 
In the great city of San Francisco, home to the most obsessive foodies in the United States, I’ve created salad junkies who are just as passionate as the original coffee junkies. I’ll stop by any of my Mixt Greens restaurants in the middle of the afternoon and there’s always a line out the door. It makes me feel good to see all those people eating those wonderful greens. One day a man walked up to me and said, “I don’t know how you did it, but you’ve even gotten men to eat salad all the time!” Now, granted, they’re not eating prewashed greens thrown into a bowl and loaded up with some overly sugared dressing . . . These are my kinds of salads: organic, hyper-fresh, deeply layered with flavors and textures, and totally, completely addictive.
 
Cooking with fine products and the conscious use of seasonal ingredients have been part of my cooking vocabulary for a long time, starting on the East Coast. After a stint at New York’s Gramercy Tavern, I attended the Culinary Institute of America. While there, I studied Alice Waters’s farm-to-table movement, which supported local, organic, and sustainable eating. I could hear California calling. New York is a food mecca, but it is more French influenced, while the farm-to-table chefs in California have more of a fusion-influenced cuisine that was exciting to me. And when I eventually came to San Francisco, I could see that the food economy was really driven by local artisans. Farmers deliver directly to restaurants here. The interaction is huge, and the community is highly aware of local, sustainable eating. It’s Alice Waters’s legacy in full force. So, after working in various restaurants, I was convinced this was the place I wanted to start my own restaurants. To be embraced by this highly evolved—and picky—super-foodie community would be a great feeling, and the San Francisco equivalent of “If you can make it here . . . .” A gig at Gary Danko ended up being the key step in becoming friendly with the city.
 
After all, part of the reason I created Mixt Greens was to give to this community—to deliver premium, good food in a fast-casual environment. To create fun, accessible fine dining that’s not intimidating. And, in the process, to teach people how to eat in a sustainable way.
 
BIRTH OF MIXT GREENS  
 
When I was sixteen, I started working at the local Chatham Sandwich Shop in my New Jersey hometown. At that point I never expected that I would make a career out of it. At twenty, I started working in fine dining and I got hooked. But the one thing that always drove me nuts was the lifestyle: coming home at 2 a.m., sleeping ‘till noon, then starting all over again the next day—plus having to work weekends and holidays. This all got me thinking about how I could improve my routine while working in this industry that I care so deeply about.
 
Then it came to me: open a high-end, quick-service restaurant using all that I learned in top-notch gourmet restaurants over the years. I got excited rethinking the whole approach to fast-casual food—creating a chef driven company serving the highest quality local and organic ingredients, all with the highest level attention to customer service. It sounded like a fantastic idea; I knew I wanted to share my passion for food with the masses. I had been playing around with a few potential concepts when one day my best friend Joanne suggested salads. Man, did that get the wheels turning. While driving back from snowboarding in Lake Tahoe with my sister and my brother-in-law, I turned to them and said, “What do you guys think about a salad concept?” With that, the collaboration began.
 
With the expertise of my sister, who has a degree in biodiversity, conservation, and management, and the business savvy of my brother-in-law, a partnership was born. On first glance, it seemed crazy; family members are the last people I ever expected to found a restaurant with. But man, what a great call—we’re a dynamic trio and every day is full of adventure. We’re happy to say that Mixt Greens is not just great food with a side of environmental responsibility—it’s the whole experience.
 
LIVING RESPONSIBLY 
 
Along the way, I’ve adopted habits that lower my personal environmental impact. Here’s a rundown of some commonsense, sustainability basics for your kitchen:
 
•  Buy local products and produce.
•  Eat and cook seasonal foods.
•  Use wooden tools in the kitchen, but never use wooden salad bowls. They look good and are environmentally friendly but the oils and vinegars leach into the wood and make it taste bad, whereas there are no remnants in stainless steel bowls. Think of it like this: wine that’s aged in porous wooden barrels has an earthy taste of the wood; wine that’s aged in stainless steel barrels has a cleaner mineral or fruity finish. 
•  Use dishrags, not paper towels, and cloth napkins instead of paper.
•  Eliminate the use of disposable utensils and plates.
•  Recycle, and instead of lining the recycling bin with a bag you buy in a grocery store, use a paper bag your grocery store packs your items in—then you’ve recycled that, too. 
•  Use green cleaning products, including a green hand soap. This is really important, because chemicals on your hands can transfer to your food!
•  Composting at home is very easy if you don’t have a commercial service. If you can garden as well, create compost to fertilize your garden. (For non-gardeners, there are a lot of easy things to grow, from a windowsill herb garden to a pot of tomatoes on your back step—now, that’s local.) 
•  Know what you’re going to get out of your refrigerator before you open it. Each time you open the fridge you’re using tremendous energy, including the cooling and even the lightbulb that turns on. Know where your item is and grab as many things as possible at once. 
•  When buying new appliances, look for the highest energy star rating.
•  When selecting your foods, choose unprocessed, fresh ingredients, fresh vegetables, fresh everything. A tip: when in the supermarket, keep to the perimeter. Stay out of the middle. You want fresh meat, fish, produce, and dairy, not packaged items. Avoid the frozen food section. Buying processed food is outrageously expensive, and there are extra calories to boot. Make it fresh!
•  When buying produce, check out the numbers on the labels to know how it was grown (more on that in the first chapter).

Table of Contents

contents
 
Introduction  /  3
 
The Seasonal Table  /  9
 
Building a Salad  /  17
 
Spring  /  35
 
Summer  /  57
 
Fall  /  91
 
Winter  /  113
 
Index  /  149
 
Acknowledgments  /  154

Editorial Reviews

The founder and executive chef of San Francisco's boutique salad joint Mixt Greens, Swallow gives top billing to the humble salad in a collection that is by turns lush, lavish and imaginative, including signature dishes like the Park Ave (grilled chicken, herb-roasted fingerling potatoes, grilled asparagus and Parmesan), its meaty mate the Bachelor (with Yukon Gold potatoes, filet mignon and Roquefort), the Tokyo (Kobe beef carpaccio with fried leeks) and the Grove (Honeycrisp apples, fennel, spiced walnuts and blue cheese). Organized by season, and prefaced with a guide to maximizing on-hand produce, this volume gives salad makers an imaginative push, though they may hit a wall trying to source key ingredients like aged sherry vinegar, sweetbreads, quail eggs, and hedgehog mushrooms. The salad-averse will appreciate the Porky-mixed greens, roasted butternut squash, pork tenderloin and port reduction-and Swallow's bunless Kobe beef cheeseburger, served atop butter lettuce. Though some may be disappointed in the selection of dressings, nearly all of which are vinaigrette variations, this is a vital, inspired and varied collection that even steak-and-potatoes fans can appreciate.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

"If you only envision lettuce and carrots when you think of salad, this cookbook will widen your horizons."
—Library Journal, Best Books 2010: How-To list, 11/18/10

"Andrew Swallow, founder and executive chef at Mixt Greens, heard about your salad slump. And he's here to expand your horizons beyond boring lettuce with his new cookbook, Mixt Salads. Turn over a new leaf."
—VitalJuice.com, 5/19/10

"With the book organized by season, Swallow proves that salad is right for every occasion."
—Condé Nast Traveler, 5/17/10

"[I]ntriguing and fun to explore."
—San Francisco Chronicle, 3/21/10

From the Publisher

Swallow's San Francisco restaurant, Mixt Greens, and his first cookbook demonstrate his commitment to local, organic, and seasonal foods. He includes glossaries for meat, seafood, herbs, oils, and vinegars and a seasonal produce chart. Swallow, writing with Volkwein (Guy Fieri's coauthor), uses tuna, beef, squid, and eggs as well as fruits and vegetables to create inspired salads. Serve Bachelor (Filet Mignon with Roquefort and Red Leaf) to the man in your life who swears he doesn't like salad. A wonderful salad cookbook.

Library Journal