Chili Crisp Tricolore Salad with Spicy Tahini

I love bitter green salads and have always wanted to try making a Chili Crisp Tricolore salad. It did not disappoint 👏👏👏

Years ago, I worked front of house in a small Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side named Brio NYC (not affiliated with the chain restaurant Brio that can be found in the suburban North Eastern United States. This was a small spot right on the corner of 61st and Lexington avenue in Manhattan that was owned by a small family from Puglia in Southern Italy (Should out to Primitivo which is a type of wine that I often enjoy 😋)

I worked there on and off over a period of 5 or 6 years from the time I was going to college through a period where some of my best friends and I started building a small production company (but that's another story). It was at Brio where I really started to learn a lot more about Italian food and also about cooking in general. 

One dish that really stayed with me is the tricolore salad (and really any bitter green based salad for that matter). I love the bitter crunch of the greens contrasted by the bright acidity of lemon juice or red wine vinegar, accompanied by a smooth olive oil and some shaved parm for some nutty salty goodness.

Over the past year, I’ve been thinking of making a variation leaning into Chili Crisp. It’s certainly been done before, I had just never come across it so decided to give it a go.

For our dressing, we’re swapping out the olive oil for some chili oil (in this case Sichuan Gold Oil by flybyjing) and whisking it together with some tahini (for nutty flavor and body), toasted sesame oil (deeper nutty flavor) and a nice hit of lemon juice (to brighten it up). As always salt to taste with your dressings.

I decided to also whisk up a quick mixture of tahini, chili crisp (also using flybyjing) and lemon juice to use as a bed for the salad to give the dish a bit more body and help smooth out the flavors a bit.

Once plated we pour a heaping tbsp of Chili crisp over the top of the salad followed by some more lemon juice and flakey salt to help everything pop! I’m using Chengdu Crunch for this by flybyjing because of how chunky it is with all of the ‘fixings’ there are in the mixture but another chunkier chili crisp like laoganma would also work great!

Side note: I’m using several chili oil/crisp/crunch products for this recipe but you can definitely stick to just one so you don’t need to go out and by 3 jars of product for this 😅If you do, make sure to use a chunkier chili crisp so you have a nice variation of texture.

Cheers,

Joey

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