Whats In A Cobb Salad
A good Cobb salad contains lots and lots of toppings, all chopped up into bite-sized pieces. The lettuce base gets a burst of flavor and texture by using several types varietiesromaine, butter, Boston, frisee, endive or watercressbut you can use any type of lettuce you happen to have on hand. Just make sure to chop the lettuce into pieces that are small enough to fit on your fork.
As far as the toppings go, the classic preparation includes chicken, bacon, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, avocado and blue cheese. Its important to cook the chicken, bacon and eggs far enough in advance to let them cool, as hot toppings will cause the lettuce to wilt. You can use any method you like to cook the chicken. We like pan-roasted or grilled chicken breasts to ensure the chicken stays juicy as it cooks.
Cooks Note Cobb Salad Recipe:
- If you want a creamier dressing to go with this salad, then look no further than this Homemade Blue Cheese Dressing is a delicious choice.
- Most Cobb Salad recipes include chicken, but I decided to mix things up and add leftover ham from Easter. If you dont like ham, feel free to use chicken or turkey instead.
- I like to put a little extra blue cheese into my dressing. If youd rather not just leave it out, it will still taste amazing!
- I love this Cobb Salad recipe because it uses up leftover ham AND Easter eggs. Woot, woot!
- I hate when I use only some of the herbs I bought for a recipe because the rest usually go to waste in the refrigerator. After all, I forgot about them. Theyre so stinkin expensive! What I love about this recipe is that it uses an entire clamshell of chives, and none go to waste!
- I like to pass the dressing with this salad instead of dressing it on the platter. This way, if theres extra, it wont go to waste because its already dressed.
Why Is It Called A Cobb Salad
Rumor has it that the salad was invented in the late 1930s at the Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles, California. Owner Robert Cobb found himself hungry and surrounded by leftovers. He put a little of this and a little of that on a bed of lettuce. The resulting salad was so delicious, he shared it with his friend Sid Grauman. Grauman came back asking for the Cobb salad, and before long, it was a favorite among movie stars and celebrities.
It landed on the menu at the Brown Derby, where it was prepared tableside. Part of the appeal was the spectacle of seeing a salad come together right in front of your eyes. Today, the salad usually comes prearranged, displaying strips of ingredients that you mix together in the bowl. The visual appeal is strong, but the flavors are what really set this salad aside. Its smoky, savory, creamy, crunchy and salty, all at once.
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Can I Make Cobb Salad Ahead
You can make the salad and the dressing 2-3 hours ahead of your dinner. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate. Keep the salad and dressing separate until ready to serve. Here are some make-ahead tips:
- Dressing make this in a mason jar so you can shake it well just before serving in case it separates. Serve it right out of the mason jar.
- Lettuce can be rinsed and dried ahead , then refrigerate until ready to use.
- Avocado should be sliced shortly before serving since avocado tends to discolor when it comes in contact with air.
- Chicken Breast can be pre-cooked and chilled .
- Bacon can be browned ahead. Drain on paper towels and refrigerate until ready to use.
- Eggs can be made several days in advance. Cook hard-boiled eggs and refrigerate until ready to use.
This Chicken Cobb Salad is easy to assemble but sure looks stunning when served. Everything about this salad is good! This homemade version blows the Chick Fil a Cobb Salad and Cheesecake Factorys salad out of the water.
Cook The Eggs And Chicken Breast
In addition to the bacon, you need some chicken breast and hard boiled eggs.
I always have chicken breast on hand via my Crockpot Chicken Breast method, so I have protein available to add to salads like this. All you have have to do is place boneless, skinless chicken breasts into the bottom of a slow cooker and season with salt, herbs, spices, or whatever youd like.
Then set it to low and let it cook gently for a few hours.
My Grilled Chicken Breast is also fantastic here.
Heres my tutorial for easy peel hard boiled eggs. In a nutshell, place eggs in boiling water for 13 minutes, then place in an ice bath for a minute to chill, and peel.
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What Is The Difference Between A Chef And A Cobb Salad
A chef salad and a Cobb salad both have lettuce, cheese, meats such as chicken and bacon, and hard-boiled eggs. However, what sets the Cobb salad apart is the addition of tomatoes and avocado.
Additionally, a Cobb salad typically uses a mix of lettuce types. The Cobb salad usually has a more elaborate flavor due to the type of cheese used, bitter greens, and avocado. The chef salad is typically considered a starter to the meal whereas, the Cobb salad is often considered to be the main dish.
My #MomBrain Story
When I made this Cobb Salad recipe, I was in a wicked rush. I had only a matter of minutes to finish this entrée salad recipe, photograph it, and get my family fed before my hubby and daughter had to get out the door.
I was super sleep deprived , the baby was being high maintenance , and I needed dinner on the table like 5 minutes ago. Oi!
I quickly layered the salad on my platter, styled the shot, and snapped away. I remember thinking to myself:
Wow, these photos are actually going to look AWESOME!
I got my family fed while I cleaned up the kitchen and then sat down to eat. I grabbed my camera so I could scroll through the photos.
Before I could take my first bite of Cobb salad, it hit me. I had forgotten to put the SD card back into my camera! I had NO photos, NONE! I think I cried. No, I cried.
Luckily for you, I recently updated the picture of this salad, and you can now see it beautifully layered as it should be!
Hard-Boiled Eggs Week
How To Keep The Dressing From Separating
A salad dressing creates an emulsion by mixing two ingredients that dont typically combine and keeping them suspended. Most dressings are semi-permanent emulsions, meaning eventually, they separate over time. Mustard helps to keep a longer suspension and acts as an emulsifying agent. You can also use a small amount of mayonnaise if storing the dressing for longer than a few hours.
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Grilled Steak Cobb Salad
This post is a collaboration with Beef. Its Whats for Dinner. on behalf of the Beef Checkoff. I received compensation, but all opinions are my own. Enjoy this delicious, easy and flavorful Grilled Steak Cobb Salad! All the classic Cobb Salad favorites plus sizzling, grilled steak and a red wine Dijon vinaigrette dressing!
When the weather is warm, there is nothing better than the sounds and smells of sizzling steak on the grill, am I right? There is simply not much better than a delicious meal that can be pulled together without ever turning on the oven especially in the summer!
Topping it with steak takes it from a ho-hum boring salad into a delicious entree thats not only filling but will have you making it over and over! Trust me! Its SO good!
My family loves Cobb Salads and weve recently been enjoying them topped with grilled New York Strip Steak we all know steak reigns supreme for grilling season and I have been so excited to show you just how easy this salad is to make!
FUN FACT: Did you know that according to a consumer survey, consumers say that they are most likely to grill during these holidays:
- 69% July 4th
- 60% Labor Day
Summer grilling season it is! If youre hosting friends for the 4th of July or just looking for a hearty salad to make, this Steak Cobb Salad will be your new favorite. Dont forget the red wine Dijon vinaigrette dressing, its absolutely delicious!
Essential Tools For Making A Cobb Salad
For starters, youll need a large salad bowl. We like bowls that have wide, sloping edges to give you plenty of room for creating a beautiful presentation. They also tend to make it easier to toss the salad before serving it.
Since this salad includes hard-boiled eggs, we also recommend an egg cooker. It lets you cook seven eggs at a time, and creates perfectly boiled eggs every time. If you end up with leftovers, dont worry hard-boiled eggs are good in the refrigerator for up to a week.
Finally, now might be a good time to pick up an avocado slicer. You could use a regular knife, but this gadget makes it super easy to create presentation-worthy slices for your salad.
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How To Make Cobb Salad
The cobb salad is super easy to throw together, I used ingredients we already had in our pantry and refrigerator. Simple & effortless.
GREENS. Toss some romaine and mixed greens together
PROTEIN. Add the chicken . Add hard boiled eggs. Throw in bacon bits . Toss in cubed cheese .
VEGGIES/TOPPINGS. Add corn . Top with cherry tomatoes, avocado, green onion, and sunflower seeds
DRESSING. Dress with buttermilk ranch dressing.
Veggie Tips:
- Ripe avocado? A ripe avocado is black and slightly yields to pressure. It is overly ripe when it is totally black and overly mushy. If it is green its not ripe at all.
- What greens are included in mixed greens: baby romaine, oak leaf lettuce, swiss chard, mizuna, arugula, frisee, and radicchio
/4the Origin Of Cobb Salad
The history of Cobb Salad dates back to 1937, wherein the craving for a quick meal led to the invention of a sumptuous classic salad. Interestingly, one fine morning at Brown Derby restaurant, Hollywood, California, a hungry restaurant owner Bob Cobb was looking for ingredients to make a quick meal. Ruffling and shuffling through the refrigerator, he randomly picked ingredients like hard-boiled eggs, blue cheese, tomatoes, chives and avocado, which he combined and tossed together to create a meal.
While he was tossing the salad, he could smell bacon being cooked somewhere nearby so he grabbed a few pieces of bacon and added it to this salad. He shared about this quick meal that he had created with his friend Sid Grauman .
The next morning, when he visited the Brown Derby restaurant, he placed an order for the special salad created by Cobb and he asked them to serve the Cobb Salad, and thats how this classic salad got its name.
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Building Your Cobb Salad
Lets talk about building this delicious entree salad. Especially if youre hosting company and want to serve up a beautiful salad, here are my tips.
Its all about the layers. You can toss it all together or my personal preference, a beautiful, layered salad platter. This allows your dinner guests to serve themselves from their favorite Cobb Salad ingredients.
So, start by layering the lettuces and top with rows of all the delicious Cobb Salad toppings!
- Grilled Steak
The Best Order For Preparing A Cobb Salad
Cobb salad is a basic chopped salad defined by its combination of cooked chicken breast, blue cheese, hard-cooked eggs, and crisp bacon. If you have leftovers from meal prep say, cooked chicken or eggs you should absolutely use them. If you dont, prepping all the ingredients from scratch wont take long if you prepare them in the following order:
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Who Invented The Cobb Salad
Cobb salad received its name from a restaurant owner named Robert Cobb. After a long night of service, Chef Cobb was tired and hungry at the Brown Derby in Hollywood, CA. He threw together a bunch of leftover ingredients into a bowl with lettuce and tossed them together with French dressing.
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How To Make A Cobb Salad
If you enjoy spring mix lettuce, use it as your base for the salad. Otherwise, any combination of iceberg, romaine, kale and spring mix works great. The main protein in a Cobb salad is chicken, which can be grilled, pulled from a rotisserie chicken or baked and shredded chicken breasts. From there, its as simple as chopping some crispy bacon to add a complementary salty touch to the sweet red peppers and Roma tomatoes. Sliced avocados, hard boiled eggs and red onions also make great additions. Finish it off by topping it with your favorite dressinganything from red wine vinegar to creamy avocado ranch dressing or balsamic vinaigrette.
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How To Make A Cobb Salad In Advance
This recipe makes enough toppings for eight classic Cobb salads, perfect for feeding a crowd or for meal prepping a week of lunches. Ensuring the salads stay fresh is really a matter of keeping the salad dry pack the dressing separately, and leave the avocado off until just before serving. Layering the ingredients as directed below will keep the salad fresh for several days if stored covered in the fridge until ready to eat.
Make the red wine vinaigrette.
What Is The Difference Between A Chef’s Salad And A Cobb Salad
The traditional chef’s salad and Cobb salad share a few traits in common, but they are distinctly different salad dishes. Both are composed salads in which the ingredients are arranged before service and both contain lettuce and meats, but the similarities essentially stop there. There is also some dispute about the origins of each and several different people are credited with inventing or popularizing both salads. Whatever the origins, both are indisputably popular and they are a mainstay on the appetizer menus of restaurants all over the world.
According to food historians, the origins of the chef’s salad may lie as early as the 17th century, when people prepared a dish with lettuce and meat known as salmagundi. This sounds a great deal like modern chef’s salad, which is usually served with sliced hard boiled eggs as well. Chef Louis Diat who worked at the Ritz in the 1940s is often given the credit for popularizing the chef’s salad, but this dish was on many menus prior to the 1940s in a frame which would be recognizable to today’s diners.
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Whisk Together The Dressing
For the dressing, I place extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar, mustard, garlic, salt, and pepper in a bowl:
The ingredients are quite simple, but it goes nicely with the bold flavors that are already there in the salad, like the salty bacon and blue cheese crumbles.
Whisk the dressing together until creamy and combined:
Other great options for dressing are my Lemon Vinaigrette and Balsamic Vinaigrette, which I love keeping on hand for salads.
The Origin Of The Cobb Salad
Cobb salad was originally created in 1937 in the Hollywood restaurant Brown Derby by the owner named Robert Cobb. The story goes that Robert Cobb was looking for a snack in the restaurants kitchen, and grabbed whatever ingredients he could find: lettuce, hard-boiled egg, avocado, tomato, chicken, onion, bacon and blue cheese. He chopped the ingredients and mixed it to make himself a quick meal, and it tasted so good that he put it on the restaurants menu, and thats how Cobb salad was born. And the rest, as they say, is history.
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Why Is It Called Cobb Salad
There are several different stories about this particular matter, but the most popular one tells about Hollywoods Brown Derby restaurant and its signature dish around its opening in 1929. There are some differences in terms of who invented salad in the first place. Some people claim that the inventor was the restaurants chef Robert Kreis even though the salad got its name after the owner of the restaurant, Robert Cobb. On the other hand, some people believe that it was Cobb himself who came up with the Cobb salad almost a decade after the opening of the restaurant, in 1937.