The Ultimate Guide to Making Great Salads
This is an ode to a beloved staple on dinner tables, healthy lunches, and filling bowls everywhere around the world. This is the humble yet extremely versatile dish: the salad. There are many different kinds of salads with different ingredients, flavors, and textures. It can be hard to know what would make the best salad for the right occasion. Whether it’s spun, tossed, or even shaken in a jar, this guide will help you learn what makes a satisfying salad.
What makes a great salad?
Making a salad seems like a no-brainer. Vegetables and dressing. But making a great salad requires a balance of flavors, textures, and colors. With a variety of fresh ingredients, spices, sauces, and other components, it can be hard to know what to use for which occasion. There are many different parts to the salad but it mixes down into four main components: your base, crunch, protein, and dressing.
Playing with any of these four combinations can yield wonderfully delicious and creative dishes - just be careful not to venture a little too far with it. Adding parmesan cheese on lettuce may sound delicious but on grapes or garlic won't yield the same taste. Let's explore these foundations of what makes a great salad a little further.
Choose your base:
Choosing the base of your salad is one of the most important steps to any great salad. You have many iconic and classic options with the common being pasta, potato, and leafy greens. The key to getting the best out of your salad base is freshness. If you’re using vegetables like carrots, tomatoes, and bell peppers, the freshest ones will yield the most flavor. One key way to bring out the freshness in leafy greens like romaine, iceberg, and butter lettuce is to soak them in cold water before tossing them in the bowl. For other ingredients like pasta and potatoes, a squeeze of lemon juice will bring out the flavor. The fresher the ingredients the more delicious the salad will be. Having one or a combination of any of the three ingredients will make a sturdy base for the rest of the ingredients that come next.
Other delicious components include quinoa, rice, tuna, turkey, chicken, and even vegetables like corn, beets, and zucchini. Try out different base components to see what you like best!
Add your protein:
The protein is an often overlooked part of the salad. Though it may taste delicious with a grilled chicken or a can of tuna, there are many, many different options you can have to literally and figuratively beef up your salads. Beans and legumes have a lot of protein and are a great source if you have dietary restrictions or preferences like being a vegan or vegetarian. A hard-boiled egg is another way to add additional protein. Nuts like almonds, cashews, and walnuts are another way to not only add protein and also an additional crunch as well.
It is important when also thinking about adding additional toppings to consider the textures while eating the dish. A crispy breaded chicken will add a crunch throughout the dish while a boiled egg can take away from the overall bite of the meal. Almonds may taste great in a pasta salad but a crunch may not be what everyone is expecting in a potato salad. It’s important to consider how these added proteins can complement the overall dish rather than detract from them.
Add your crunch:
Now that there’s a base and protein, let's add a little fun. The crunch is arguably the best part of any salad and there are so many ways to do so. It’s the salty, crispy, crackle paired with the lightness of the salad base that gives this delicious textural balance in the mouth. The most common way to add a little crunch to your salad is to add croutons, but you can also make a crunch using toasted pita, nuts, seeds, pickles, roasted vegetables, chips, and many many more.
There is so much room for you to be creative with your crunch and flavoring your croutons, nuts, and seeds is another way to add another level of dimensions. Spicy pecans, roasted turmeric chickpeas, and honey mustard croutons are ways to flavor your crunch elements to give contrast to the rest of your salad dishes.
The trick is to bring contrast - if there are a lot of soft elements like in a pasta salad, croutons may be a little too strong of a texture change for it to be enjoyable. Something like Roasted chickpeas, cashews, cucumbers, and pickles are all great options depending on the type of pasta salad. With a salad that features a little bit of crunch like a caesar salad, croutons are the classic combination. Adding some extra crunch like roasted chickpeas and almonds are all possible additional sources of crunch to create an explosion of textures in your mouth!
Combine your dressing:
So now that you have all these delicious ingredients, textures, and flavors, how do we bring them all together? That's where the magic of dressings comes in. Adding olive oils, vinegar, mayo and other combinations of fat and acid will help bring out the delicious taste of the dish. The key here is to bring balance to the other flavors.
Acids are great in these dishes and common choices are red wine vinegar and lemon juice. Fats like olive oil, mayonnaise, and butter can all contribute to this. If your salad is tasting a little too savory, adding a sweetness like honey, maple syrup, and berries can take away the salty taste.
Once you master these four elements, making a salad for any occasion will become second nature! One last note: don’t forget to add your favorite toppings and garnishes such as cheeses like feta cheese and goat cheese, dried fruits, and herbs, to liven any dish! Don’t forget a little bit of salt can also help bring out the flavors.
Now that you know what makes a great salad, here are some delicious and classic salads for you to draw from when you’re making one at home.
Greens salads: These are made with leafy greens as the base and have a lot of color coming from vegetables, dressings, and the choice of protein. Some of the most common salads are cobb and caesar salads with the base typically being romaine lettuce and topped with delicious croutons or olives and served with an egg on top or in the dressing.
Pasta salads: These salads are made with cooked pasta followed by a lot of delicious and fresh ingredients like olives, bell peppers, red onions, spinach, and arugula. Some of these are lighter on the dressing with lemon juice or olive oil. A common type is a Greek or Mediterranean pasta salad which is served cold and features lots of fresh ingredients topped with crumbled feta cheese.
Vegetable salads: These salads can be served cold or warm and often feature a lot of a singular vegetable. They can be topped with more vegetables but it is often just one base with adornments like red onions or herbs like dill or mint. These are great sides for barbecues, comfort foods, and for anyone looking to increase their vegetable intake. Some salads like these are Greek salads, caprese salad, cucumber salad, and many more.
Fruit salad: Probably the freshest tasting, a fruit salad is composed of many delicious fruits typically cut into bite-sized cubes. Watermelon, honeydew, and cantaloupe are commonly found in this salad but there are many more possible additions such as berries, apples, kiwis, yogurt, and mint. A very popular fruit salad is a refrigerated dessert known as an ambrosia salad. This is made with fresh fruits, whipped cream, marshmallows, and shredded coconut. It is an unconventional but delicious dish popularized in the 1970s in the southern part of the United States.
Protein salads: These salads are made using a variety of proteins such as turkey, chicken, tuna, tofu, shrimp, mushroom, and more! They’re a great way to use up leftovers from dinner and toss them in a bowl with mayo, spices and more! Commonly known protein salads include turkey salad, tuna salad, and shrimp salad.
And there you have it! Now you know the foundation to making a good salad as well as some classic salad combinations to get you making the best salads you can possibly make. There are many, many more salads with different flavor combinations, textures, and tastes loved around the world so the possibilities are truly endless when it comes to this delicious bowl of mixed produce.
If you are still not sure what to make, we recommend a fun twist on the classic BLT with our BLT (Beans or Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato) Salad. Made with butter lettuce, crispy bacon, and crunchy sourdough bread and combined with a mayonnaise dressing; this salad brings the beloved BLT to bowl form. Also, it's vegetarian-friendly when you swap out the bacon for beans! It is an easy salad recipe that works year-round for so many meals. Try it below:
