The Genius Of Zuni's Bread Salad
On a recent rare day-off — a short calm before the twin storms of Spore’s launch and the re-release of spore.com — I decided to make a dinner of roast chicken and bread salad. I thought it a spontaneous idea, but any Bay Area foodie knows that it is Zuni Cafe’s most famous dish. And, like many of the restaurant’s biggest hits, the recipe appears in the must-have Zuni Cafe Cookbook.
Judy Rodgers’ detailed bread salad recipe, modified to embrace seasonal ingredients, makes a delicious dish. But that’s not what struck me about it.
The bread salad pairs so well with the chicken because of the texture contrast. Even a good roast chicken has only two textures: tender flesh and crispy skin. The bread salad covers the whole spectrum between soft and crunchy. Her technique has you toast a few big chunks of bread and then tear them into pieces from bite-size to bread crumbs. Then she has you toss your 4 cups of bread with 1/4 cup vinaigrette: a scant amount. The result, as she says, is “a mixture of soft, moist wads, crispy-on-the-outside-but-moist-in-the-middle wads, and a few downright crispy ones.”
Cooking with texture seems like graduate-level cooking technique, but in fact we all know texture combinations that work well: crispy cones with smooth ice cream, crunchy cole slaw with tender barbecue, and crackling crust around creamy risotto in a rice cake. By triggering different sensations, these pairings keep our mouths interested in each bite. Still, it’s one thing to follow established traditions and another to pursue and explore this interplay. I wouldn’t say that I had incorporated texture at a conscious level, but now I plan to and see where it takes me.
Spore has shipped! Our new website is live. That means I may be able to return to life as a writer: I spent today researching an Art of Eating article, and I hope to get back into the blogging habit. Thanks for hanging on.
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