I really appreciate this recipe only makes 1/2 cup, the perfect amount
After making Bobby Flay‘s chicken pot pie from his recently published Bar Americain Cookbook published by Random House of Canada, I decided to take on a less complicated recipe but one that, if I liked it, would impress the hell out of me.
An Iron Chef salad dressing with only lemons for acidity? If I liked this, it would be a miracle!
When I was at the Superstore I was so excited to see they finally had the fabled Meyer lemon! All the foodie shows talk about its natural sweetness and superiority to the regular lemon. Now I could use it in Bobby Flay’s dressing!
Put 1/4 cup buttermilk, 1/4 cup sour cream and 1 tbsp of fresh lemon juice into a blender and blend until combined. I used my mini chopper and then added 2 oz of crumbled blue cheese. I am in the process of product testing PC Blue Cheese right now so that is what I threw in. Blend until smooth and season with salt and pepper.
How did it taste?
Bland and so sour at the same time! So one blech note. Ugh! I put it all over this beautiful huge salad and each bite was so hard to eat. How could a blue-cheese dressing be boring? And no, I do not think it was the Meyer lemon’s fault at all. Wish I could just blame the lemon!
I was not going to let that blue cheese go to waste. I thought, OK, maybe it is just missing some acidity. To add some without impacting on the pure whiteness of the dressing I tried white wine vinegar… Nope, still pretty flat. So I took out the red wine vinegar. Better!
But it still wasn’t enough. Come on Bobby! Blue cheese dressing has to have some bite, some depth… So I crushed in one clove of garlic and added more salt and pepper.
There! Now it tasted like a real blue cheese dressing and was not boring and (shudder) sour without flavour. The only problem is after adding all that vinegar, it was now super thin so I used it for a light dip for my veggies and Buffalo chicken. Then it was killer!
Perhaps it is just personal preference and my picky tastebuds but I hated Bobby Flay’s original recipe. Zero spoons! Now some people with a more subtle palette may like it but I am just glad that I managed to boost the flavours in a way that I could enjoy dressing, especially the blue cheese.
This is perhaps Chef Flay’s easiest recipe but if it is, I would rather spend days making his chicken pot pie again.
Suzie, you saved yet another recipe with your kitchen magic. The original Bobby Flay recipe does seem a little too basic. I’m curious to see what you think of the Meyer lemons. I’ve tried them in the past and I honestly prefer just a basic, normal lemon. I found the zest of the Meyer just weird, maybe the lemons I bought were a bit off though, not sure.
I could not disagree more. The key is to let the blue cheese shine. Blue cheese is far from bland. With only a few ingredients, the quality of
those ingredients is critical. I used pointe reyes blue cheese and it came out far better than any store-bought dressing.