Crunchy-soft, warm-chilled, sweet-spicy, this is a salad that has it all. Matty Matheson’s throwback to the Brussels sprouts dishes of the 2010s — ubiquitous in just about every gastropub of that era — gets an upgrade with a chile-packed fish sauce caramel and a snowy showering of fresh mint, lime and shaved Brussels sprouts in his cookbook “Soups, Salads, Sandwiches.”
Adapted here with greater detail for the caramel-making process, this is a recipe that requires a bit of patience but delivers with big flavor and perfect balance. It’s also a recipe that might leave you with a small reserve of chile fish-sauce caramel dressing; save it in the fridge for other salads, or use it as a meat or seafood marinade.
“Twelve years ago, you couldn’t walk into a restaurant and not get fried Brussels sprouts with a spicy sauce or something,” Matheson writes. “It was like wildfire. This is the 2020s redux version of something we all used to love that got beaten down so hard from triple-trickle-down restaurant folks. But these fried Brussels deserve to live again because this is something special. The deep caramelization from frying combined with that super-bouncy crunch of the raw is world class. This salad is so f—ing good. Wow. Let’s honor the 2010s.”
