How to Eat All That Zucchini? A Newfangled, Totally Genius Caesar Salad.

Sept 20, 20177:03 AM

Zoodles: The most delicious way to eat zucchini.
*Julia Gartland*

This post originally appeared in Genius Recipes on Food52.

Caesar purists, stay calm. This salad from the historic Blackberry Farm resort in Walland, Tennessee has plenty in common with the classic you know and love—both in key ingredients and in feisty-bright-creamy-garlicky experience—but it also diverges, quite a lot.

We’re still going to call it Caesar, and it’s so good you should make it even if we called it Chuck.

Because brawny Caesar ingredients like lemon, garlic, and Worcestershire inevitably still zing through (how could they not?), but are softened with the addition of Green Goddess-style freshness (in tarragon, chives, and lemon zest).

And while the ingredient list may look longer than your average Caesar, everything fluffs together near-instantly in a food processor, spinning into a smooth, creamy-green elixir, ready to pour on anything you choose.

But in particular: You are to pour it on zoodles—a.k.a. raw matchsticks of zucchini that resemble, arguably, a noodle. While the watery green crunch of Romaine lettuce (and celery, if you’re my dad) has always been an excellent foil for a creamy, pushy dressing, so too is the zoodle.

It’s fresh in a more subdued way, with a pale resilience, and substantial enough to be lunch. Just a thin blanket of dressing is enough to find yourself eating a whole lot of zucchini, which is handy because that seems to be how zucchini comes.

The last flourish is a cheese crisp, or frico—and the one step that makes this not a completely no-heat recipe. But I don’t recommend skipping it, no matter how sweaty you feel.

Because for the effort of grating cheese in piles and baking it for 5 minutes, you get the fanciest-looking and most addictive of garnishes: its salty, lacy bite snipping and snapping against the glossy, soft, and bouncy salad. Caesar purists, have I swayed you to the dark side yet?