Chris Makes Hot Honey Radicchio Salad

If you wanna break a couple of them apart,

like that's fine.

I prefer to just like,

leave the leaves a little bit more whole

and then eat my salads

with like a knife and fork.

But then again, I eat pizza with a knife and fork.

So it's not really saying much

[Rusty] Do you eat a burger with your hands?

[laughs] I draw the line on burgers.

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This recipe for this salad came out of a desire

to kind of showcase like how I like making salads in winter.

Cold weather and winter is about like anything but lettuce.

And there's so many other things

that make for great salads

during that cold weather season.

Radicchio is kind of top of the list for me.

It's in the Chicory Family.

They are this wonderful family of very assertively flavored,

leafy veg, anything.

I think, you know that lettuce can do,

Radicchio can do better.

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I have to say hazelnut is my favorite nut.

I'll like [beep] die for hazelnut.

Almonds are good too.

I celebrate the walnut, pistachio,

I mean, sure nothing to sniff up,

but I'm sorry, like cashews they're...

I just don't think they're that good.

Like they're not.

Does anybody like wanna die for a cashew?

[Rusty] No.

All right, so these are going in the oven

and we're gonna forget about it, okay?

It's gonna be about seven to 10 minutes,

something in that range for 350 degrees.

When you apply heat to it, you are changing the fats,

you are developing flavors,

you know you are unlocking aromatic compounds.

There's just so many different things

that go into those processes.

And so much flavor becomes accessible when you do that.

This is at about eight or nine minutes.

Those look great.

I mean, it's just like a whole order of magnitude darker,

but I think we're still on the right side of the line.

You know, I think like five more minutes

and they'd be a little bit too much kind of like,

you know kind of accurate bitterness,

but this looks great to me.

[Rusty] Why'd you put those in the oven?

Why don't you cook them in skillet?

Oh yeah, this guy.

Let's do a demo.

If you're toasting nuts in a skillet,

all of the heat is coming from the bottom

of that pan pretty much, right?

So your contact area is actually very, very, very small.

So what that means is you have nuts

that are very unevenly toasted.

You will never, I repeat,

never get nuts like this, okay?

If you toast them dry in a skillet.

Doing them in the oven low and slow,

it really just roasts them throughout.

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How do you turn salad into dinner more or less?

You need a little bit of protein,

you need a little bit of like, you know,

kind of texture and a couple of things going on

for it to really feel like a meal.

I find that the black quinoa

has like the most texture to it.

And the most kind of pronounced nutty kind of grassy flavor.

I'm gonna grab, you know, pot of water.

And then we're going to cook this quinoa like pasta.

When I say cook it like pasta,

I mean an excess of water,

once it's boiling, the grain is gonna go in.

It's going to simmer until it's al dente, or tender.

And then all the water is gonna be drained out,

and I'm gonna return it to the pot

just to kind of let it steam out

a little bit of the excess liquid at that point.

I want fluffy distinct grains

that are gonna separate, that are going to disperse

throughout whatever I'm throwing them into.

Good amount of salt,

and then quinoa's gonna go right in.

We can leave it uncovered just so you're looking at it,

making eye contact with it,

not forgetting about it and just walking away.

So let's see what's happening

with this here quinoa, all right?

This is looking good.

Here's what we're gonna do.

We're gonna drain it.

I wanna take out as much of this water as possible.

You're gonna get these, like, you know,

these loose, you know, kind of germs

kind of coming off of the quinoa.

And that's what you're looking for.

So now, off heat.

I'm gonna cover it a little bit.

Extra moisture is gonna steam out of that quinoa.

And I'm just gonna kinda pour it off

when I go to use it in a few minutes, all right?

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Spicy things and sweet things,

you know very often can go together,

especially in savory culinary applications.

I'm gonna do a couple of tablespoons of honey.

I'm just gonna thin this out with a little bit of water.

I just don't want it to start to burn.

So we've got gochugaru and Aleppo

as our mild crushed red pepper flakes here.

Gochugaru, you know Korean chili flakes,

just a wonderful addition to your pantry

because they're relatively mild.

They have an almost inherent sweetness to them.

So I'm just gonna bring this

to a really quick simmer over on the stove.

And that's just gonna bloom the flavor of the chili.

All right, so we just brought it to a quick summer,

quick little infusion.

It also just dissolves the honey a little bit

so that it's gonna disperse nicely through our dressing.

So I'm gonna throw in our olive oil, and then rice vinegar.

There's a lot of flavors going on in there.

But until you put a pretty decent amount of salt in there,

it's not really even gonna taste like much.

With the salt in there,

everything's just like turned up.

And it's like one in a catch in the back of my throat,

just a little bit more.

It's really nice.

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Being able to build a salad in a bowl,

and be able to kind of manipulate it a little bit,

does wonders.

You want to, you know, get each leaf coated

with the right amount of dressing.

You wanna season by dispersing,

you know, salt, whatever else,

you know, across like as much of the surface area

as you can.

The way these sort of petals,

the way these leaves are arranged

is sort of in these like concentric rings, right?

So if you kind of just like find the edge,

and sort of pull the leaf apart,

you can just sort of like work your way around,

and not necessarily tear them all.

When it comes to radicchio, one type is great,

two types is better,

three types I feel like makes you an all star

and so fun.

I'm just breaking up some of these Treviso.

I'm gonna throw some of this quinoa in here,

I'm gonna put in some dressing.

Now, this dressing has been seasoned up just with salt.

You know, I'm gonna bump up

like a little extra salt in here.

You need to be tasting as you go, always,

you know, see is the amount of dressing enough?

You know, don't use it all right away.

Use about half, see where you're at.

The salt is there.

All right, ready to take this to the platter.

Sometimes I like just honestly use my hands

for this stage after I'm done.

But I just find like

all those different shades of radicchio,

all the color, all the textures,

all the different flavors just so fun.

Like a little like extra scatter quinoa,

so make sure you've got enough in there.

A little final drizzle of dressing,

you know, hazelnuts like you can chop them.

You know, when they're this toasty and crunchy,

you can just kind of crush them with the flat of your hand.

You know, you can't do that with an under toasted nut

or God helped me a cashew, especially a raw one.

This is Cotija.

It's just a really lovely salty kind of funky cheese

from Mexico.

And some cilantro, there we go.

First, I wanna like taste a piece of Castelfranco.

There's like this warmth to it

that's amplified by the hot honey vinaigrette.

Like if you're hesitant, you know, hearing that title

and thinking that it's going to be like overly spicy,

it's really not.

And I got a lot of flak at home for creating salads

that are frankly nothing but radicchio,

but that is truly what I crave.

You know, it's easy to have on hand,

it stays just perfectly well for weeks at a time

in your crisper drawer, it's ready when you need it.

And then it just provides all the texture

you could ever want, really interesting flavor.

And it wants to soak up other flavors as well,

and really balance them out.

Everything in there honestly like,

there's a lot of flavor and there's a lot of texture

happening with every single element.

But put them all together, it's just delicious.

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[Rusty] All right.

Now, I just wanna redo the recipe

with an apron that doesn't have a stain on it.

[all laughing]