A Caesar salad feels at home almost anywhere. It’s a steakhouse mainstay, a go-to room service order, and a beloved work lunch. And now, with so many new iterations of Caesars — from potato salads to tartares — you can really Caesar anything.
“A Caesar has all the components that you always think of as what makes food good,” says recipe developer and cookbook author Hailee Catalano. “There’s umami from the anchovies, the mustard is a little tart, the lemon is acidic, more umami from the Parmesan. It’s classic and balanced.”
On Catalano’s recipe blog Cafe Hailee, there are no fewer than eight different Caesar-inspired recipes, including a Caesar potato salad and steamed artichokes with a Caesar dressing. In her debut cookbook, By Heart (out April 15), there’s a little gem salad that isn’t a Caesar, but sits atop a bean dip that’s bolstered with Caesar flavor. “Caesar can be a spread, it can be a dip, it can obviously be a salad dressing,” Catalano says. “It can also be a steak sauce. It’s basically an aioli.”
At Wes Avila’s West Hollywood restaurant, MXO, Avila swaps a classic Caesar’s standard romaine lettuce base for charred cabbage, a move that feels hearty and comforting but maintains the robust savoriness of a typical Caesar salad. “Caesar was invented in Tijuana and we’re a Mexican restaurant, so we knew we wanted to have a salad that paid homage to our roots,” Avila explains. “Myself and my chef de cuisine came up with this salad that really encompassed all of our favorite things, like the cheese, the anchovy, the egg, the Parmesan dressing, and the toothiness of the greens.”
For home cooks who want to experiment with Caesar using a different base, Avila suggests pairing the popular flavor profile with seasonal greens. “You can use broccolini or braised or fried artichokes,” he suggests. “Asparagus season is coming up; you can add the dressing to asparagus and do a poached egg.”
One way Catalano experiments with her own Caesar variations is introducing new ingredients to the original rendition. “I’ll sometimes add Calabrian chiles, and that becomes a Calabrian chile Caesar dressing that makes it spicy but also adds a bit of fermented flavor to it,” she explains. She’s also incorporated charred corn for sweetness and porcini mushroom powder for an extra punch of umami.
Another method that helps in Catalano’s own recipe development is thinking of Caesar in any place where mayonnaise would make sense. “That’s how I got my idea for Caesar potato salad, because that’s a mayo-based thing,” she says. “A tuna salad with Caesar would also be very good, or a creamy coleslaw with Caesar dressing for summer grilling.”
Caesar salad, it turns out, no longer needs to be confined to lettuce and croutons, but is a perfect springboard to new creations. “The Caesar is a dish that can be completely taken apart and put back together in a million ways, depending on the season,” Avila says. Just be sure to preserve what makes it so good in the first place: the delightful textures, the richness, the fluffy mounds of cheese, the ample tang, and, of course, the balance of flavor.
