Home & Lifestyle, Food

Cooking From Your Kitchen Garden: Salsa Verde

Lesson time 09:25 min

Alice teaches you to make one of her favorite and most versatile sauces, salsa verde. Alice demonstrates a version made with macerated shallots and offers variations on the sauce to serve with meats, vegetables, and fish.

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Topics include: Salsa Verde

Alice Waters

Teaches the Art of Home Cooking

In 16+ lessons, learn to cook beautiful, seasonal meals at home from the James Beard Award-winning founder of Chez Panisse.

Preview

ALICE WATERS: I'm going to teach you how to make a very simple sauce. It's called Salsa Verde, an Italian sauce, a green sauce, made out of green herbs. And I use it a lot to just, again, bring up the flavor. It's sometimes with a fish, sometimes with a piece of chicken. Sometimes it's just, you know, dip a vegetable in it. It's basically just shallots, maybe capers which I love, maybe even anchovies. I'm going to do this one without anchovies. I'm going to use the parsley from my garden. And again, just picking the leaves off. Not extremely carefully. It wouldn't hurt if it had a stem in there or two, but I'm roughly doing that. And I'm going to use the chives as well. It's basically just a vinaigrette variation because it has both olive oil and vinegar in it, but the primary look of it is green because it has all of this parsley, could have chervil in it as well. But because of the capers, I don't want to waste the chervil. I'd rather have the chervil in my salad as that kind of little flavor, than to lose the taste of chervil with this the Salsa Verde ingredients. Sometimes when I'm serving it with like a lamb chop, you might want to put mint in the Salsa Verde. I might even do it with the tops of fennel if I'm really thinking about a fish dish. A traditional Italian Salsa Verde has olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, and capers, and sometimes a little chopped anchovy. We've taken that idea and come up with other variations. I'm going to dice up the shallots next, because it's really nice to have them macerate a little bit in the vinegar. Because it tames the strength of the strong flavor of the shallot. These are amazing shallots. They're just so firm. Feels like they just came out of the ground. But I'm probably going to use about a half of a shallot. So I'm cutting off one end, leaving the other one intact. Works better with my fingers. But the idea is to make a little tiny dice. And to do that, you have a quite sharp knife and you're making horizontal cuts that go almost to the end, and the root is holding it all together. Now I'm going to make incisions that go right down, holding it together as they go. And then the little trick is to cut this piece very, very finely. So that you get that little cubes of shallots. And my eyes are tearing as I'm cutting it, but you can always wash your hands in cold water afterwards. But there we have our little dice of shallots. And I'm going to put these right in the bowl like that. And I'm going to put some vinegar up at the top and put all those shallots way down in there. A little bit of salt, that always helps with the taming of the shallots. And just let it sit there while I chop up the rest of the herbs. And begin chopping, just comes by practice. I love this kind of knife because I can sort of scoop things back up on the spot as I'm doing them. I kind of like hearing the rhythm of it. This one's to be quite fine because you're wanting the sauce to come together, you k...

About the Instructor

Alice Waters started America’s farm-to-table revolution. When she founded the iconic restaurant Chez Panisse, her local, organic ingredients sparked a movement and earned her the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef. In her first-ever online cooking class, Alice opens the doors of her home kitchen to teach you how to pick seasonal ingredients, create healthy and beautiful meals, and change your life by changing the food you make at home.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Alice Waters

In 16+ lessons, learn to cook beautiful, seasonal meals at home from the James Beard Award-winning founder of Chez Panisse.

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