I’m dripping with sweat in an “air conditioned” room as I write this, and although I know the heat is not going to last forever, it’s like living through heartache: It’s hard to imagine life on the other side.
And what that means, when it comes to cooking, is that the only thing I can think of is not cooking.
Enter the chopped salad.
The chopped salad, or at least a well-made chopped salad, is one in which all the components are chopped to roughly the same size and shape and then tossed together with a dressing, usually some kind of vinaigrette.
The best part about chopped salads is that kind of like heat waves in Southern California, they’re not relegated to one season. The other thing we love about them: They’re not just a salad. They’re a meal.
There are many contenders for the title of Original Chopped, but one thing is certain, the chopped salad is Angeleno through and through. The Cobb salad, invented in the 1930s at the legendary Brown Derby restaurant, is a top contender. (If you are interested in the history of salads, you really should read this. Even if you’re not, you’ll be interested once you start reading.)
Even though it’s often served composed, the ingredients — bacon, tomatoes, egg and blue cheese — are cut (or crumbled) to the same size. And that is a key to what makes the Cobb the truly great salad that it is.
The ingredients for chopped salads are chopped just so not because we are control freaks. (We are not control freaks. We are Californians. We have signs in our restaurants that say, “No shirt, no shoes, no problem.”)
They’re chopped that way because we need to eat the salad with this thing called a fork, and the fork needs to go through all the ingredients, so you get every flavor in each bite. With a leafy salad, you hope the shaving of cheese or the candied pecan (heaven help us) surf atop the leaf and make their way into your mouth. You might even pick up a pecan with your fingers and put it there.
With a chopped, you take a stab at the veritable haystack of vegetables with your mini-pitch fork and have at it. Anyone who has ever sat before a Nancy’s Chopped at Pizzeria Mozza or a veritable trough of Joan’s on Third’s Chinese Chicken Salad knows: A chopped salad is fun to eat precisely because it is chopped.
The original chopped salad as we know it (or at least the Italian-style chopped) is the La Scala Chop Salad, invented in the 1960s at the Beverly Hills institution, La Scala.
I visited the restaurant a couple of decades ago for a story and had the privilege of going into the kitchen to witness the spectacle of that salad being made. The chef held two knives, parallel, strapped together with, if memory serves me, rubber bands, and hacked at an enormous pile of iceberg, salami, mozzarella cheese and pepperoncini for about 15 violent seconds before inverting this minced overdressed masterpiece in a smooth dome on a dinner plate with a pile of marinated garbanzo beans on top.
The ingredients are not shredded or neatly sliced. They are butchered. And that’s the beauty of it. The tangy vinaigrette has all that surface area to cover. It’s like an antipasto plate that hardly requires you to chew.
Wolfgang Puck, the man who brought you smoked salmon on pizza and other studies in California fusion cuisine, made quite a mark on the chopped salad, contributing not one, but two game-changing salads to the canon: One was the Chinese chicken salad from his Asian fusion place, Chinois on Main. Madame Wu’s version was supposedly the original and the salad has roots in Chinese cuisine, but with his fancier version, it seems like Wolfgang took it mainstream.
And the other was the Chino Ranch chopped salad, which he began serving at Spago in the 1980s, inspired by the vegetables delivered regularly from the famous San Diego farm, Chino Ranch. (The salad is no longer on the menu.) The salad was a story in seasonal, farmstand abundance. For me, early on in my culinary career, it was a master class in use what you have.
I was not born with the Alice Waters gene where you go to a farmers market and let the ingredients inspire what you make. Instead, I go to a farmers market, let the ingredients inspire me to spend a lot of money, and then all too often watch those ingredients wilt in my home because I don’t know what to do with them. The chopped salad changed all that for me.
Today, I make a good tangy vinaigrette — usually the sherry vinaigrette from “The Mozza Cookbook” (which I co-authored) — chop up my loot — zucchini, carrots, celery, onion of some kind, green beans (I always buy them, but I don’t think they’re that tasty, frankly), fennel, red or yellow peppers, sugar snaps and halved cherry tomatoes. (I don’t do raw chopped tomatoes; all those seeds and that slimy stuff in the middle = not for me.) I’m not going to win an award for a masterful combination of flavors. But I like the kitchen sink aspect of it. I might toss in some chickpeas if I have them. Or hard salami if I’ve got that rolling around. A good dressing and grated parm, Pecorino or crumbled feta cheese tossed in there brings it all together.
My chopped salad is a kitchen helper. It allows me to get a little wild and crazy at the market — no matter what time of year — and not to throw out any produce. Now that’s a friend.
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Jar Chopped Salad
What makes this salad from chef Suzanne Tracht’s steakhouse, Jar, special is that such an unusual and unexpected combination of ingredients — roasted chicken, prosciutto, olives, celery, carrots (huh?) — come together and somehow make sense. No longer on the menu, the good news is it’s easy to make yourself.
Get the recipe.
Cooking time: 30 minutes. Serves 2.
(Hanna Carter / For The Times)
Nancy’s Chopped Salad
Nancy Silverton’s chopped salad, a stalwart of Pizzeria Mozza, has become as much a national icon as Nancy herself, copy-catted, often even attributed to her, on menus nationwide. A mountain of radicchio, iceberg, red onion, halved cherry tomatoes, salami, provolone cheese and chickpeas and tossed in a tangy red wine oregano vinaigrette — it’s refreshing, flavorful, packed with the word of the moment: protein. It’s a hearty meal for two. No cooking required.
Get the recipe.
Cooking time: 30 minutes. Serves 6.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
Chinois Chicken Salad
It’s hard to imagine where we Southern Californians would be without the Chinese chicken salad, and we have the Chinois chicken salad from Chinois on Main, Wolfgang Puck’s Santa Monica institution, to thank for that. It’s sweet, a bit spicy (the dressing is made with Chinese hot mustard) and a delight of contrasting flavors and textures. Once you get past the word “fry,” as in “fry the wontons,” you’ll see that it couldn’t be easier to put together. (And, hint: Frying wontons is easy. So is buying them fried.)
Get the recipe.
Cooking time: 30 minutes. Serves 6.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
La Scala Chop Salad
The grandaddy of all chopped salads — and, for what it’s worth, a Kardashian favorite — this masterpiece in iceberg form from the Beverly Hills institution, La Scala, went viral when it was learned to be a Kardashian favorite. The lettuce is chopped super fine, which means more surface area for the vinaigrette. Like Nancy’s Chopped Salad, it’s laced with Italian antipasto platter flavors. Make it a meal. The Kardashians do.
Get the recipe.
