Pear and Goat Cheese Salad with Brown Butter Vinaigrette

This post is sponsored by Gourmet Garden. I have received compensation and product in exchange for creating this recipe. All opinions are my own, and I only work with brands I love and feel will be useful for my readers.

Pear and Goat Cheese Salad with Brown Butter Vinaigrette

This salad is a spectacular addition to your fall table. It’s a great candidate for salad for dinner especially if topped with leftover cold chicken. It will also make a fabulous Thanksgiving salad. I’m serving this at a fancy dinner party I’m doing in Chicago next month. Honestly how can you say no to brown butter- and since it’s on salad it’s practically health food, right? Jump Straight to Recipe

Saving room for salad is a thing, right? In the U.S. we like to start our meals with salad, but when my family came from France, they didn’t get “Salad comes first” memo. As a child, I was often pressed by my family as to why I wasn’t finishing my meat (I always ate my veggies). My answer was always that I was saving room for salad.

These days, Joshua and I eat most of our meals family style and everything is on the table at once. Even still, I always make sure my last bite is salad. What can I say, I’m a creature of habit?

This beautiful mixed green salad with pickled onions, sautéed pears, goat cheese, toasted hazelnuts and brown butter vinaigrette is 100% last-bite worthy. Perfectly balanced with sweet, creamy, sour, and bitter flavors, this salad also boasts an array of textures from smooth goat cheese to crunchy hazelnuts.

I’ll admit that I ate this for lunch several days in a row while recipe testing. I’m definitely putting this salad on my Thanksgiving table and I can’t imagine a better salad to bring to a potluck! I can pretty much guarantee that if you do, everyone will be asking “Who brought the salad?”

Whether you choose to begin or end your meal with salad is up to you. Just a warning, if you serve your salad after the entrée, make sure you save room for salad.

Pear and Goat Cheese Salad with Brown Butter Vinaigrette
This salad tastes delightfully of fall. Use your favorite ingredients here to make the salad really shine. I chose grass fed unsalted butter. If you use salted, please adjust the amount of sea salt accordingly. I also used a very nice Zinfandel vinegar for both the pickled onions and the vinaigrette. Choose pears that smell fragrant and are still a bit firm to the touch. Bartlett pears are my favorite for this recipe. For the brine, I used Gourmet Garden lightly dried herbs for both simplicity and for their excellent flavor.

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Pear and Goat Cheese Salad with Brown Butter Vinaigrette

Prep time:  15 mins

Cook time:  10 mins

Total time:  25 mins

Serves: 6 servings

This salad is a spectacular addition to your fall table. It’s a great candidate for salad for dinner especially if topped with leftover cold chicken. It will also make a fabulous Thanksgiving salad. I’m serving this at a fancy dinner party I’m doing in Chicago next month. Honestly how can you say no to brown butter- and since it’s on salad it’s practically health food, right?

Ingredients

• Pear and Goat Cheese Salad with Pickled Onions and Brown Butter Vinaigrette
• 1 red onion, thinly sliced
• 1 cup red wine vinegar
• ½ cup water
• ¼ cup packed dark muscavado sugar or dark brown sugar http://amzn.to/1P0BKsu
• ½ teaspoon sea salt
• 2 tablespoons Gourmet Garden lightly dried parsley
• 2 tablespoons Gourmet Garden lightly dried chili
• 2 pears, sliced into wedges
• 4 cups mixed greens
• 2 cups chopped radicchio (you can substitute with two more cups of salad greens/bitter greens)
• 4 oz fresh goat cheese (chevre)
• ¼ cup toasted hazelnuts (optional)
• Brown Butter Vinaigrette
• 3.5 tablespoons brown butter (½ tablespoon reserved for pears)
• 1 tablespoon room temperature water
• 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
• ¼ teaspoon sea salt

Instructions

1. 1. Make Pickled Onions
2. Place sliced onions in a large, non-reactive bowl. In a medium sauce pan, bring red wine vinegar, water, sugar, sea salt, and Gourmet Garden lightly dried herbs to a boil. Pour over thinly sliced red onions and rest for at least 20 minutes and then transfer to a zip top bag and push all of the air out. Marinate for at least 1 hour before serving.
3. 2. Make Brown Butter:
4. Add 3.5 tablespoons of butter to a heavy stainless steel skillet over medium heat. It will bubble and spit, and make lots of noise. Don’t be afraid, but do be patient. Eventually, your butter will turn light golden brown, and then voila, dark amber, nutty brown. That’s right where you want it. Immediately pour it out of the pan leaving about a half tablespoon of brown butter in the pan so you can sauté those pears.
5. 3. Sautée Pears:
6. Add sliced pears to the pan where you made the brown butter, and gently sauté over medium heat until pears take on a bit of color and soften a bit (about 3 minutes) Flip to the second side to finish.
7. 4. Make Brown Butter Vinaigrette:
8. Whisk 3 tablespoons warm brown butter with water, red wine, and sea salt. If the dressing sits out for about an hour, it will starts to solidify. To liquify again, whisk it over a bowl of very hot water.
9. 5. Assemble Salad:
10. Layer lettuces with brown butter pears, pickled onion, toasted hazelnuts, and crumbled chèvre. Drizzle the salad with brown butter vinaigrette and serve immediately.

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