[upbeat music] - So when I was growing up in the mountains of North Carolina, my family often ate what we called wilted salads or killed lettuce salads.

And I've always loved that flavor combination of greens with a little bit of a warm dressing, and that's what I'm gonna do with collards today.

It is a great way to get traditional flavors in a very contemporary collard recipe.

But sometimes collards are a little more mature, and they're going to need a step called blanching and shocking, and that's what I'm gonna show you right now.

[bright music] All I have here is a pot of boiling water, and I'm gonna add a big pinch of salt to my water.

I have here my big bowl of collards.

I am putting these in the boiling water, and this is the blanching step.

I don't want them cooked tender, I just want them to give up a little bit, just get lightly wilted.

It takes anywhere from 30 seconds, no more than a minute.

And when they get just right, I'm going to take my little strainer here, and I'm going to transfer them into a bowl of ice water.

This step is called shocking, and the shocking does two really important and useful things.

The first is it immediately stops the cooking.

The other beautiful thing that this shocking does is it sets that brilliant, vibrant green.

So that is blanching and shocking.

You can use it for all kinds of recipes, but it is an important first step for this collared salad.

So when these have cooled off, and it only takes a few seconds, I need to get as much of this water out of here as I can.

And I have tried all kinds of methods, and I'm finding nothing works better than my fingers.

I'm literally squeezing these as dry as I can get them, but I'm still putting them in a colander over a bowl so that if there is any clinging water, it will continue to drop out.

[bacon sizzling] So I've been cooking some bacon in my trusty cast iron skillet, and I've let it get crispy, and I've let it render its fat, because those delicious smoky drippings are gonna be the foundation of the dressing I'm gonna build right in the pan.

Now that my bacon is crisp, I'm gonna take a slotted spoon and take this bacon out.

I don't wanna leave it in the pan, because I want it to be beautifully crisp when it goes back on top of the salad.

Now that my bacon is out, I'm gonna add my first ingredient to this, and that is some beautiful sliced red onion.

I like to put it in fairly large pieces, small enough that it'll cook through a little bit, but large enough that it's gonna be one of the characters in the salad, so let them stir that up in the fat, add my pinch of salt that I almost always do when I'm cooking onions, because that's going to start letting those onions release its moisture and turn tender a little bit better, plus, we are seasoning as we go.

I love garlic in this recipe.

Now, it's important that you let your onions cook just a little bit before you add the garlic, because garlic, believe it or not, has more natural sugar in it, and you're gonna wanna let some of the moisture from those onions come out to insulate that garlic as we go along.

Look how quickly these onions are picking up that great golden color.

Now I'm gonna add some brown sugar to this, 'cause in the end, I want the smokiness of the bacon, I want the pungency of the garlic and the onions, I want some sweetness and a little heat.

It's a simple thing, but I want all these flavors to be perceptible and to balance one another.

Love that sizzle.

This smells so good.

Gonna put in a little pinch of crushed red pepper flakes, and then I'm gonna do a step called de glazing.

It's just what it sounds like.

We've got that bacony, delicious glaze on the pan, and we want to release that flavor.

This is vinegar, and so I'm gonna put enough vinegar in there, about a quarter cup and hear that sizzle.

[vinegar sizzling] It is going to loosen the last bit of all of that delicious flavor from the bottom of the pan.

So look what we've done here.

We have made a dressing.

We had the bacon fat, the vinegar, the other things.

We have made this beautiful warm dressing right in the pan.

And when it bubbles a little bit, it is time to start adding our collards back in.

Take our little things, we want to tease them back out apart now, going to undo those little squeezed clumps, and you don't wanna cook it very long.

I want it to be warm, but this is a salad, so I'm not gonna let it go too far.

[bright music] This smells so good.

And just that fast, we have this beautiful wilted salad.

It's warm, it's satisfying, but it's still a salad, because there is a little bit of residual crunch in these collards that's just what I was looking for.

And I got some garnishes that are gonna round it out just right.

Remember the bacon I set aside earlier, this beautiful crisp bacon?

I'm gonna sprinkle that right back across the top.

And then, because I love a crunchy element on a salad, these are just good pecan pieces.

I don't know what it is about collards and bacon and pecans, but it is a wonderful combination of things.

I'm gonna add a little fresh ground pepper.

This is pickled raisins that I have had soaking in vinegar, just plain vinegar like I put in the dressing for a few days until they plump up.

There's a tiny pinch of red pepper flakes in there, and this is turned into something that tastes almost like chutney.

I'm gonna take one more bite in the skillet.

A recipe will get you started and a reliable recipe will get you mostly there, but if you don't taste your food, you don't know when it will suit you, and when it suits you, it's gonna suit everybody.

You gotta taste your food.

Mm, this is just what I was going for.

It's beautifully balanced.

There's the smoky, there's the sweet, there's chewy, there's crisp, there's color, there's texture.

It's such a simple dish, but there's a lot of things going on in here that make this an interesting salad.

I hope you'll think of collards a different way from this.

It can be a salad green.

It just needs a little bit of cooking and some delicious things on top, and you have a great meal.

[upbeat music]