I’ve shared in many a recipe post here on the Older Bolder Life about growing up in the South; the South has a wonderful food culture and history and boasts some of the hottest and most innovative food scenes in the country (Houston, NOLA, Atlanta, and Charleston to name a few).
Much of what I remember eating during my childhood and early adulthood was truly simple yet delicious Texan and Southern fare, like great low-and-slow BBQ, fresh-off-the-boat Gulf seafood, mouth-watering Tex-Mex, and even iconic sides like the Texas Wedge Salad.
Nostalgia-invoking powers aside, there’s nothing very fancy about a classic Texas-style wedge salad – it’s a literal wedge of cold, crisp iceberg lettuce, classically drenched in some version of Ranch dressing, with crumbled bacon, fresh-cracked pepper, and if you were dining in a place that was really uptown, maybe even some blue cheese crumbles too.
We still serve up a wedge salad now and again around our camp, but now do this Texas Mini-Wedge Salad with Buttermilk Sour Cream Dressing, topped with bacon, avocado pieces, toasted pepitas or pecans, and some of that “uptown” crumbled blue cheese. You can see from the image that this one perhaps isn’t the “prettiest” salad you’ll serve this week, but it very well might be the tastiest.
Cutting a head of crispy iceberg lettuce into 8 wedges instead of 4 makes this salad easier to manage on the plate and lets more of the tangy, lemony buttermilk sour cream dressing coat everything. By the time you trim a head of lettuce down and remove the wilted outer leaves, you’ll probably want to count on a head of lettuce serving two hungry diners.
A recipe of Buttermilk Sour Cream Dressing
4-8 pieces of thick-sliced bacon, fried crisp, drained and crumbled
2 tight, medium heads of iceberg lettuce, root-end trimmed, wilted leaves removed
2 medium, firm avocados, cut in wedges
1 bunch fresh chives, but into 3/4” pieces
Good salt and fresh-cracked coarse pepper
Optional
Roughly 1/2 cup of toasted pepitas or pecans
Handful of grape or cherry tomatoes
1/2 cup or so of good crumbled blue cheese
Lemon quarters for squeezing
Prep the dressing (hold in the fridge); fry the bacon, crumble, and set aside.
Prep the lettuce, cut into quarters, then cut each quarter into 1/8-head wedges. Cut each mini-wedge crosswise into 2 to 3 inch pieces, and plate artfully. Drop a few tomatoes in if using.
Work a few avocado wedges among the lettuce on each place, drizzle with dressing, then top with the toasted nuts, chives, and blue cheese if using. Spritz with a lemon quarter and go to it.
Enjoy.
