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Cobb salads are already pretty fancy as far as your colder entrees go. Their lovely rows of chopped chicken, blue cheese, hard boiled egg, tomato, bacon, and avocado over greens seem ideally composed for long lunches at breezy sidewalk cafes with crisp glasses of dry white wine. And food world celebrity Ina Garten makes the dish even more elegant by swapping the poultry for lobster.
Garten’s lobster Cobb salad recipe, featured in her cookbook “Barefoot Contessa Family Style,” is written to serve four to six people, but you can easily scale it up or down depending on the size of your dinner party. Her instructions also do not specify how you come by the 1½ pounds of lobster in the mix, so it’s safe to assume that Garten’s famed phrase “store-bought is fine” is applicable in this case. Luke’s pre-split lobster tails are available in 6 ounce portions, and you can likely find shell-free varieties from assorted brands at your local seafood store. Should you insist on making it from scratch, a simple butter poached lobster method will leave everyone impressed.
More Cobb salad upgrades — as though it needs any
Invented by the eponymous owner of Los Angeles’ Brown Derby, a Cobb salad is typically built on a base of romaine, but other lettuce options can further dress things up. Something like a lacy frisée, which you’d more typically find joined by lardons and a softer egg in a salade Lyonnaise, creates a subtly dainty plate, peeking out from under all of the other abundant Cobb ingredients. Frisée also brings a peppery, near-bitterness to the dish.
Lobster also isn’t the only protein appropriate for a Cobb salad modification. Crab, as you might have guessed, is a similarly suitable shellfish substitution. On the opposite end of the heartiness spectrum, red meat like homemade butter-basted steak and restaurant leftovers like filet mignon and chateaubriand are also excellent in a Cobb salad. The juicy beef gives even more substance to the light veggies, and blue cheese is a go-to steak companion in any preparation.
