Elevate Your Caesar Salad with This Recipe
This Caesar salad recipe is basically an assemble-and-go salad that always has people commenting, "This is the best Caesar salad I've ever had!"
This is an easy way to update your homemade Caesar salad, and it doesn’t require any particular dressing recipe. Use your own special Caesar salad dressing recipe (we love this one here) or a store-bought one, like Marzetti, which is what we used for this recipe.
As an aside, did you know that the original, first-ever Caesar salad recipe came from our neighbors to the south, Mexico? Yes, I had no idea and assumed it had been named for Julius Caesar. On a recent trip to Mexico, the owner of the restaurant where we were having dinner told us about how his dad was working at a restaurant in Tijuana when the first-ever Caesar salad was made. What?! Of course, we all thought he was pulling our leg. But, after some google searching, lo and behold, it’s true.
Over 100 years ago, an Italian immigrant to America, Caesar Cardini, relocated his restaurant to Tijuana to avoid prohibition and continue selling alcohol with meals. He made the first Caesar salad at his restaurant, Cardini’s, in 1924 when his kitchen was running short on supplies, and he needed to improvise. He served the dressing — made of only five ingredients: raw egg, olive oil, croutons, Parmesan cheese, and Worcestershire sauce — smeared on whole leaves of romaine lettuce. (source)
We’ve all had plenty of variations in our lifetime, and we’ll have many more. After all, it’s the ultimate “comfort food” salad. For this version, featuring capers and hard-boiled egg, I highly recommend adding salmon if you want to make this into a main dish.
And, use shaved Parmesan cheese! My go-to is the Private Edition brand, sold at Kroger. Or, freshly shave some from a block of Parmesan cheese when making this salad. The thin, wide, shaved pieces definitely elevate it.
This Caesar salad takes a layered approach, which is then topped with chopped hard-boiled egg and chopped capers. I prefer to add thinly sliced red onion across the top as well, but for a large gathering, which is typically when I make this recipe, I tend to leave it off. Additionally, I’ve started adding breadcrumbs to this salad instead of croutons, and the feedback from others has been great. It’s the familiarity of bread chunks, just in smaller bits! I’m gluten-free and commonly keep a jar of gluten-free breadcrumbs in with my spices, which makes adding them to various dishes super simple.
Let’s get started!
Caesar Salad with Capers, Hard-Boiled Egg, and Onion
Ingredients
- 7 oz washed and dried romaine lettuce leaves, chopped
- 2 oz shaved Parmesan cheese, Private Edition brand
- 1/2 cup Marzetti® Supreme Caesar Dressing
- 1/2 cup Kroger® Gluten-Free Traditional Bread Crumbs
- 4 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
- 1 tbsp chopped capers
- Maldon salt flakes and black pepper to taste
Instructions
- Chop up your lettuce and add half of it to a large bowl.
- Toss 1/4 cup of dressing with this lettuce and a few shakes of black pepper.
- Place this dressed lettuce on a serving platter and top with half the shaved Parmesan cheese, 1/4 cup of breadcrumbs, and a small pinch of salt.
- Do the same thing with the rest of the lettuce and dressing, layering it on top.
- Add the rest of the cheese along with the chopped egg and capers.
- Add 1/4 cup of breadcrumbs, black pepper, and another pinch of Maldon salt flakes.
- Serve immediately.
Nutrition
Liza Graves
As CEO of StyleBlueprint, Liza also regularly writes for SB. Most of her writing is now found in the recipe archives as cooking is her stress relief!