Green Bean and Potato Salad

It's time for my Thomas Keller dinner evening again and this time I decided to choose a salad since I cooked a soup entree the month before.  Flipping through the pages, this salad caught my eye as it looks delicious and fairly simple to prepare.  The black mission figs was definitely a plus but I knew even before I went shopping that I might not find the figs given it's middle of February.  Well as it turns out, my intuition was correct, the local market told me it won't be until around May/June, that they will carry fresh figs.  I decided to still go for the salad since the rest looked so good still.

I started with the green beans, after cleaning and clipping away the stems, I used the traditional vegetable blanch -> ice bath -> cooling method to cook them through.  The result is fabulous as always.  If you need a refresher on how this works, you can check out my broccoli rabe entry.

Cooked Green Beans

Then I move onto the potatoes.  The recipe called for fingering potatoes, and in my local market, I found these baby yukon golds that pretty much looked like what's photographed in the book.  They were indeed about 1 inch in diameter and was easy to cook and slice.

Baby Yukon Gold Potatoes

Next I toasted some walnuts in the oven and also used my brand new German made mandolin to cut very thin radish slices for the salad.  The mandolin worked like a charm and produced paper thin cuts!  I was very excited to leverage this apparatus for the first time and manage to have some success with it.  Notice I was also using anti-cut gloves since the radish was so small and difficult to grab onto with the safety glide.

Paper Thin Radish Slices with Mandolin

The dressing for the salad is a very easy to make, but did call for the use of a sherry vinegar, I had only the red wine vinegar on hand.  I did find sherry vinegar at whole foods, and it was expensive, but the taste was definitely worth it.

Sherry Wine Vinegar

The salad also called for Iberico ham which is a special Spanish ham made from the leg of the black Iberian pig, of course I couldn't find any of those so as the book suggested I substituted with a good prosciutto.  The final assembly was very easy, tossing the various ingredients together with the dressing and made for an elegant presentation.  One word of warning here, do not use tongs to toss this salad because of the delicate nature of the cooked beans and potatoes.  In general, Thomas Keller discourages the use of tongs as stated in the book, but for this salad it's especially true.

Finished Green Bean and Potato Salad with Prosciutto

Tasting:

Woah!  Where to start, such a simple salad but very delicious on many levels.  The sourness from the vinegar balances so well with the saltyness of the prosciutto.  And then there's the slight bitterness from the toasted walnuts and added crunch from the radish slices.  I can only imagine what it would be like with the fresh black mission figs!