BLT Salad

an un-recipe for turning summer's best sandwich into a salad

I usually celebrate the arrival of tomato season each July or August with a big dinner of BLT sandwiches. I go all out with milk bread, perfectly ripe avocados, crisp applewood smoked bacon, Best Foods/Hellman’s mayo and juicy iceberg lettuce.

But when I started cooking our first-of-the-summer BLTs one night last month, I took a last-second detour away from sandwiches as I spotted my big wooden salad bowl. While lettuce, tomato, bacon and avocado were easy enough to adapt into salad (I added cucumbers from the garden for crunch, too), it took a minute to figure out how to incorporate the bread (and mayo, which I consider essential). After some hemming and hawing—I thought about a mayo-based dressing, but didn’t want to muddy the salad’s freshness—I decided to slice the bread into croutons to fry in an abundance of butter. Reader, it was the right choice.

The salad was so incredibly satisfying—Ebony and I ate a huge bowl of it on our own that first night—that I decided an encore was in order for the weekly dinner we share with a group of friends. That’s where Robbie Jeanne shot this little video, to show you how incredibly simple it all is to throw together (especially when you make the kiddos halve all of the cherry tomatoes). Hope you like it!

Happy cooking, my friends!

BLT Salad

Bake bacon:

• Line a rimmed baking sheet with a wire rack or a piece of parchment paper.

• Lay out as many strips of bacon as you can fit into a single layer without any overlap.

• Bake at 375° Fahrenheit until crispy, about 18 to 20 minutes. SET A TIMER!

• Let the bacon cool, then cut it into large bite-size pieces to add to the salad.

• (If needed, reheat cooked bacon, as we did in the video, at 325°Fahrenheit until warm.)

Cut up the produce :

• Here we used a head of iceberg lettuce, diced into large one-bite pieces.

• You could also use romaine, little gems, or any other crisp, water-packed lettuce.

• We 🩷 Dry Farmed Early Girls, which are packed with flavor. Get them if you can!

• Early Girls are relatively small, so we quartered them. We also halved a couple handfuls of Sungold cherry tomatoes.

• We diced two large, ripe Haas avocados to scoop into this huge bowl of salad. Add more or less to your own liking! When you toss the salad, you’ll notice the soft, creamy avocado almost becomes part of the dressing. For this reason, we wouldn’t leave it out entirely.

Optionally, add a few more veggies:

• A thinly sliced shallot, small red onion, or even green onions could be good here! If using shallot or onion, let it steep in a bit of seasoned rice vinegar for 5 minutes before adding to the salad.

• If you like, add some cucumbers (not traditional, we know, but they add a nice crunch).

Dressing:

• Drizzle the salad with a little Seasoned Rice Vinegar, Olive Oil, and season to taste with salt.

Serve & enjoy!