Buttermilk Ranch Salad with Wild Garlic Chicken

Tangy garlicky buttermilk ranch dressing, wild garlic chicken, crispy bacon and croutons - salad heaven!

Buttermilk Ranch Salad with Wild Garlic Chicken, bacon and wild garlic croutons

Wild garlic a-go-go!  Using the wild garlic butter you made from your foraged harvest, pan cook a chicken breast which you then slice up on top of a Ranch dressed crisp green salad. Add some wild garlic croutons and crispy bacon – Saturday family lunch time heaven.

Buttermilk is not so common in the UK and if you can’t get it, mix a small pot of plain yoghurt with the same volume of milk and whisk well, and you will have the right texture, although not quite the sour-dairy tang.
 
Serves 4 for lunch            Timings:  30 minutes, if using already prepared wild garlic butter, and you can roast the chicken ahead and keep cool in the fridge.
 

• Wild Garlic Butter:  100g of wild garlic leaves, washed and dried, blended with 200g slightly softened butter, some lemon juice, salt and pepper.  I like to use a stick blender for this. Blend together vigorously, then keep the butter in the fridge until you want to use it – freeze it too for when the wild garlic harvest is a thing of aromatic memory.
• 1 x chicken breast fillet about 150g. You could use chicken thighs too.  1 tablespoon wild garlic butter.
• 100g stale bread cut into cubes. Another tablespoon wild garlic butter.
  
• 100g streaky bacon rashers.
• 3 heads of little gem lettuce, or one head of Romaine lettuce – you want a green leafy crispy lettuce rather than a soft butterhead.
• For the Ranch Dressing:  250ml buttermilk, 3 tablespoons mayonnaise, 2 tablespoons olive oil, 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard, 1 clove of garlic crushed with salt, 1 teaspoon onion powder, 1 teaspoon garlic powder.

 
First pan roast your chicken meat in the wild garlic butter. Put a good spoonful of butter in a small frying pan over a medium heat and gently fry your chicken, spooning the hot butter over it, and turning it over now and then. A breast will cook in about 8-10 minutes, and a boned thigh will take a little less. The generous butter keeps the meat lovely and moist.  Leave the meat to cool and absorb more butter. You can also wrap a piece of chicken in kitchen foil and add some garlic butter to the parcel and just put the parcel in the oven for 20 minutes if you have the oven on for something else. Take it out, let it cool, keep in the fridge until you are ready to use it.

Make the croutons – fry the cubes of bread in the frying pan you used for the chicken, adding a bit more wild garlic butter as you go. The leaves of the wild garlic will fry and sizzle and go black but the taste of the croutons is spectacular. They take about 5 minutes, keep moving them around in the pan and then scoop out onto kitchen paper to cool and crisp.

Wipe out the frying pan and cook your bacon until crisp, drain on kitchen paper.

Make the ranch dressing in your largest salad bowl. Mix the dressing ingredients together well, even whisk with a small whisk if you have one. Taste and adjust the seasoning – you might want a little more salt or a squeeze of lemon juice or a teaspoon of sugar. The dressing should have a nice tang but it doesn’t taste strongly of buttermilk.

You can do all the above in advance and keep cool in the fridge for several hours.
Wash your lettuce thoroughly and dry or spin.

Tip the lettuce into the bowl with the dressing and mix well. (I believe it was Anna del Conte who taught me that a salad should be tossed at least 25 times to coat the leaves properly with the dressing, which is after all, the reason for a salad’s existence.)
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Top with the sliced chicken, crumbled bacon and crispy croutons.