How To Make Chicken Caesar Salad

For two portions, you can use one large chicken breast which weighs about 200 grams or two smaller ones, and you want to have the skin on for this recipe. Other ingredients we're going to use are Cos or Romaine lettuce which has been washed and torn into bite-size chunks, and to make the dressing, we need mayonnaise. I've got about 2-4 tablespoons of mayonnaise, 1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard, and I'm going to use half of these anchovies to make the dressing and the other half to put in the salad, also some white wine vinegar, a little bit of garlic, lemon, and then we have the croutons to go with the salad as well, and a sprinkling of Parmesan over the top at the end.

The first thing to do is trim the chicken breast of any fatty bits or nasty bits of gristle or tubes or excess skin. And then, we're going to salt the skin of the chicken reasonably well to help it crisp up and to help get some of the fat out from underneath the skin. Grind of black pepper on the top and then we're going to take it over and heat the frying pan with a little bit of oil in it, just sunflower oil, 1 or 2 tablespoons.

While that's heating up, we've also got an oven on 200 degrees centigrade or gas marked 6 because once we've browned the chicken, we want to then put it in the baking tray and bake in the oven to finish baking it. So, I'll just let that cook on skin side first until it's really nice and crispy, and then turn it over and put it into the oven to finish off cooking. And don't forget to wash your hands because raw chicken has a lot of salmonella in it, possibly, so just be careful what you do.

Make sure the chicken skin is nice and brown, and crispy, and then put it into a small roasting tin and put that in the oven for about 15-20 minutes. While the chicken is cooking, you can make the dressing for the Caesar salad and if you've got a little food processor like this, that's great, just put it all in there and blitz it. If you haven't, you just need to chop up the anchovies a little bit and then just mix everything together.

This is ready-made mayonnaise; use half of that mayonnaise if you want to, a little bit of Dijon mustard, just a teaspoon, tablespoon of white wine vinegar, and half of the anchovies. I'll also need to chop up a little bit of garlic to go with it. Then, blitz it all up for a minute or two and then add a little bit of lemon juice.

Taste it and see whether it's got a nice balance of flavours; probably won't need too much salt because the anchovies can be quite salty. That's quite sharp; I quite like it like that. Lettuce has been washed and just span a little bit to get rid of excess water.

Just toss the leaves in the dressing. I'm going to make some croutons as well to go with it and I've got two thick slices of white bread with the crust taken off. Just chop them into cubes.

Then we're going to heat up about 1 centimetre of sunflower oil in a frying pan until it's really hot and put the bread cubes in it, toss them through until they're golden-brown all over, and then they're ready for our salad as well. It's nice and brown on the top, and a way to tell if it's cooked in the middle is to use a skewer and also see how firm it is. Leave the skewer in the thickest part of the meat for about 10 seconds and then see how hot it is on the back of your wrist, and that's boiling hot, which is how we want chicken to be cooked.

A good idea is to let all meat rest once it's come out of the oven, so give it about 5 minutes before you slice it up. And while you're letting that rest, you can just mix some of the croutons in with the Cos leaves that you've dressed with the mayonnaise dressing. Then divide the salad between your two dishes.

Because this is a very big chicken breast, one will serve two people and you can just cut it slightly on the diagonal. Put that on the top, a couple more fresh anchovies on top, use a vegetable peeler just to do some shavings of Parmesan cheese. And that's how to mak