Barbuto's Legendary Kale Salad

Toasted breadcrumbs. Anchovy dressing. This is your new forever kale salad.

When I was in my late twenties, I wrote a book called Secrets of the Best Chefs for which I traveled the country and cooked with fifty famous chefs (Jose Andres! Alice Waters!) and they all taught me three recipes. Of all the chefs that I cooked with, the one who spent the most time with me, the one who was the happiest to play the “Yoda” to my “Luke Skywalker” was the iconic chef Jonathan Waxman, one of the pioneers of California cuisine.

Here’s Chef Waxman at his restaurant Barbuto back in 2010 showing me how to toss a salad in the air with just a flick of the wrist:

Photo by Elizabeth Leitzell.

And here’s me trying to replicate that move:

Photo by Elizabeth Leitzell.

Hey, I never said I was an athlete… or a chef.

Chef Waxman’s whole style is affable mastery; as in: he’s calm, he’s cool, he’s also an expert at everything that he does. And whether we were searing gnocchi in a hot skillet or prepping his all-time greatest hit, his roast chicken, he seemed to know everything there was to know on the subject and then some. No wonder his kale salad is the best I’ve ever tasted.

When it comes to making a kale salad, my usual technique is probably a lot like yours: I stem the kale and then roughly chop it. So imagine my surprise when I was flipping through the Barbuto cookbook and realized that Chef Waxman does neither of those things.

The Barbuto kale salad begins with whole leaves of kale, stems and all. Instead of roughly chopping them, you julienne them as thinly as possible.

After that you make a punchy dressing with an egg yolk (this is basically a Caesar salad dressing), anchovies (I used anchovy paste), garlic (I grated mine), Dijon, red wine vinegar, and lemon juice emulsified with extra-virgin olive oil. You can see those elements on the right along with the shredded kale, Pecorino (pre-grating), and toasted Panko breadcrumbs (a quick sauté in a skillet with some olive oil and a pinch of salt).

Once the dressing is made and you toss it through your salad it already tastes pretty amazing from all of the flavor that you’ve loaded in there. But when you add the breadcrumbs and the Pecorino? This kale enters the realm of the sublime.

So, without further ado, here’s the recipe. I made some notes about my little changes (for example: mine had zero basil because it’s winter and basil just feels wrong in winter) but for the most part, this is the recipe from the book.

Serves 6

Ingredients:

· 8 ounces kale, stems intact (I used Tuscan kale)

· 6 fresh basil leaves, patted dry and rolled like a cigar (I left these out)

· 2 – 4 salt-cured anchovies, rinsed and deboned (I used 1 Tbs anchovy paste)

· 2 whole garlic cloves

· 1 egg yolk, room temperature

· 1 Tablespoon Dijon mustard

· Sea salt

· 1 ½ teaspoons red wine vinegar

· 1 ½ teaspoons fresh lemon juice

· ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

· Freshly ground black pepper

· 1/3 a cup of grated Pecorino Romano cheese

· ½ cup toasted breadcrumbs (the cookbook recipe says 1 tablespoon, but at the restaurant they use way more)

Instructions:

1. Wash the kale well and dry in a salad spinner. With a very sharp knife, julienne the kale as thinly as possible. Place the kale in a salad bowl and keep cold.

2. In the original version, Chef Waxman has you make a paste with the basil, anchovies, and garlic. You can do that by mincing and smearing on the board until it’s a paste. Me? I just whisked together the anchovy paste, the garlic (which I grated in a microplane), egg yolk, Dijon, sea salt, red wine vinegar, and lemon juice. Then I slowly drizzled in the oil and whisked until I had a “broken” emulsion

3. Pour half the dressing over the kale, enough to coat the leaves, and with as much force as possible, crush the kale and dressing with your hands. This will release the enzymes from the kale to interact with the dressing’s acid and salt. Add a pinch of salt and few turns of pepper.

4. Sprinkle with the cheese and breadcrumbs, toss well, taste for seasoning. Serve within the hour, but letting it sit for a little while does wonders for the flavor.

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Funny enough, the Barbuto kale salad was the last thing that I cooked this weekend (it was our Sunday night dinner along with some leftover cavatappi). On Saturday I made a beautiful beet salad for lunch.

As complex as that looks, it was really just roasted beets, a simple vinaigrette, toasted almonds, some orange segments, chopped parsley and dill, and — the most important ingredient of all — a big wedge of Morbier cheese.

Yesterday we went to a casual brunch at our neighbor’s Rob and Kath’s and I asked myself “What Would Martha Stewart do?” so I made muffins. Not just any muffins: triple-ginger muffins from the NYT. (Here’s a gift link.)

These are pretty easy to make, minus the chopping of the crystalized ginger, a real pain. (I saw a NYT commenter say to do it with kitchen shears… I’ll try that next time.) But the effort was worth it because these were a huge hit: like a final farewell to those beloved Christmas-y flavors, molasses and ginger, etc.

• Can cheese prevent dementia? Please let it be true (NYT Gift Link);

• In Shakespeare, Food References are a Window into the Soul (Atlas Obscura);

• The 20 Best Podcasts of 2025… for all of your cooking needs (The Atlantic).

That’s all for today, folks!

Hope your 2026 is off to a great start….

Your pal,
Adam