(bright music)
- Hey everyone, I'm Jerry James Stone
and in today's recipe I'm gonna show you
how to make a delicious fig salad.
This thing is just gorgeous.
It's as beautiful as it is tasty.
It has these wonderful fresh figs, dried fruits,
a little bit of goat cheese, arugula.
It's just super fresh, it's super Californian.
I think you're really, really gonna like it.
But let me show you.
So to make this salad we're gonna start off
with some avocado oil, some white balsamic vinegar,
pinch of salt and some freshly cracked pepper
(pepper grinding).
Now I'm just gonna mix that together in the bowl
(spoon whirring).
Okay, so I have this really interesting fact about figs.
Did you know that figs are actually not a fruit?
They're a flower.
They're actually an inverted flower, so when they grow
on the tree this pod is not the fruit
that you think it is.
It's actually all of these little tiny flowers
growing inside of it.
Unlike an apple tree or a pear tree, it doesn't
have the typical blossoms.
You are actually eating the flower itself.
Add in some sliced red onions and add in some arugula
and I'm just gonna toss it to kind of get it coated
in my simple dressing.
This is a really lightly dressed salad.
I like my salads really, really lightly coated.
If you're more of a drench your salad in dressing,
which I'm not shaming you for, just double up
the salad dressing measurements.
But it's just really to lightly coat it.
And then add in the rest of the arugula
and just toss that, too.
So, like I said, the fig, that pod,
that pear-shaped pod, has flowers growing inside of it
and every single flower produces one single seed.
So when you're eating a fig that crunch
that you get from eating them,
you're actually eating those flower seeds.
That's what the crunch is.
Some people have said it's because you're eating bugs.
Like there's this fig wasp related to the fig tree
and you're actually not eating the wasp.
Well, you're kind of eating the wasp
but I'm gonna talk about that a little bit later.
Add in some golden raisins, some cranberries,
some candied pecans, gonna just toss it a little bit
to kind of get it fluffed up there a little.
Okay, so fig trees are actually self-fruiting trees.
They actually produce both male figs and female figs.
And in fact, we don't actually eat the male figs,
as it should be.
And also another fun fact about eating figs;
here in the United States, California produces
pretty much all of the figs
that the country consumes as a whole.
How crazy is that?
Now we're gonna add in our figs.
Just work that in with the arugula and other ingredients.
I added the figs at this stage
because I didn't want to overwork them.
They're so delicate and soft.
They're fragile little babies, but they're so tasty.
Okay, so coming back to that fig wasp thing.
So, here's kind of a little bit of history.
The fig wasp, which can only exist
if there are fig trees, has this life cycle.
It actually enters into...
all fig wasps are female, sort of.
The female wasp enters into the male fig
and that's where it lays its eggs.
The male babies then grow up, impregnate the other female
wasps that are also within the fig.
And then those male babies go and eat their way out
of the fig but, unfortunately, male fig wasps
aren't born with wings so they eat their way out
and then they kind of go out there
and just sort of die, as it should be.
The female wasps, now pregnant with their brother
baby wasp thing going on, with their baby bumps,
work their way out through the fig, but they have wings,
so they fly out and then the whole cycle starts over again.
They go and find themselves a fig and then they lay their
eggs in that one and it all goes again.
That's the life cycle of the fig wasp.
Now I'm just gonna top it off with some goat cheese.
Seriously, this salad could not be
more Californian if it tried.
So, are you actually eating a fig wasp?
The answer is, well, no but maybe yes.
So a female wasp burrows into the fig.
But the wasp can't tell if it's a male fig or a female fig.
It's like being a tourist in Thailand, has no idea.
It burrows into the fig, if it's a male fig
everything is great.
It goes in there, it lays its eggs, it dies,
its babies grow up, they mate, they burrow out,
all that stuff happens.
If it's a female fig, well the female fig anatomy
is not set up for this process.
So what happens is when it enters the fig,
its wings get ripped off, as a result of entering the fig,
and all it can do is sit there and wait to die.
It's kind of like being at the DMW.
So it sits there and it just hangs out until it dies.
Now are you actually eating that wasp?
Well here's the maybe part.
The fig actually produces an enzyme that breaks
down that wasp into proteins.
So when you're eating a fig, you have eaten
this wasp that has been broken down into proteins
and then absorbed by the very fruit/flower
that you're consuming.
So you're not eating a wasp in the traditional sense,
if there is a traditional sense for eating wasps.
But you're eating a wasp in the sense that it was
probably once inside that fig.
There you have it.
Of course a little bit more
cracked black pepper wouldn't hurt.
Now it's ready to serve.
Super tasty salad. So if you're looking for a fun,
late fall salad this is the one for you,
well anytime that figs are in season really.
But this is a super tasty one.
I think you will really, really love it.
Once again, big shout out to the California Fig Board
who sent me all these delicious figs to try out,
so many varieties, I really loved it.
Thank you very, very much.
If you have a recommendation, something that you want
to see, drop a comment below.
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and I'll see you guys next time.
(bright music)