Salads, Tossed or Otherwise: They're Calling Again
What IS a Girl To Do?
Okay, Dames Nationals! Your pledged salad missive, it’s finally here!
Recently, thanks to working from home a couple days a week with my gloriously bougie boyfriend, I’ve been eating a lot of sweetgreen delivery, and thinking “I actually enjoy eating salad, and I think I almost always have. So why don’t I eat more of it?” And then I remember the many, many bags of washed greens that I have aspirationally purchased and then left to rot in my refrigerator, unopened– clearly, Big Salad Life required something I did not yet understand. But I knew on Instagram, I had a lot of friends who seemed to live Big Salad Life effortlessly.
So, I did what I often do: I turned to my online community and sought advice. And HOT DAMN, did people deliver. When I pulled all the tips in from Instagram, I was left with an eight page Google doc (which I can share in its entirety if folks are interested!). Presented with this bounty, I am doing the only responsible thing: devoting an entire issue of our newsletter to synthesizing and sharing all this sage advice!
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And Now, I’m Tossing Some Advice Your Way
I have kept this as short as I could, and yet I must admit, it’s still a lot to take in! So, my first act of service is giving you a chance to opt out:
If you want to get this information from a book rather than from me, a truly staggering number of people recommended Salad Freak by Jess Damuck, so that’s the place to start. A couple other books that were recommended: Ottolenghi Simple by Yotam Ottolenghi for “really fun and interesting salads” (per my friend Gabe), Salad for President by Julia Sherman (“part cookbook, part coffee table book”), and The Complete Salad Cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen.
Here’s my best synthesis of the deluge of great advice I received. I am going to start with general guidance, then we’ve got a section dedicated to recommended equipment, and then we close out with one dedicated to specific recipe and ingredient recommendations. Let’s dig in!
General Salad Guidance:
The no.1 most common piece of advice I received: use a huge bowl for mixing your salads. As my friend Amma put it: “Always use a bigger bowl than you think you'll need. Always. PROMISE me, Margaret.” My friend Beth gave helpful size guidance, saying “Think of a bowl you would use to serve pasta to 4 people. Like, comically large for food for one person. The bowl equivalent of a hamster water bottle.” So: for Big Salad Life, we like Big Bowls and we cannot lie.
The next piece of clutch advice many people shared is that packaged, pre-prepped ingredients are your friends, if you can afford them. Whether that means using a bagged salad from the store as your base, a store-bought rotisserie chicken your protein, or flavored tuna packets, DO IT. Reports state that this a great way to get going with Big Salad Life.
Related to this, an extremely popular influencer who came up again and again: Caro Chambers, who has a whole series on how to fancy up bagged salads. These videos are great whether you treat them like specific recipes or whether you view them as inspirations for perfecting your own add-in game.
Another #influencer to check out, although in this case for salads from scratch: Julia Turshen, whose salad formulas came up multiple times and are exactly the type of non-recipe recipe I most need as a low-confidence home cook.
A two other Salad Influencers who came up repeatedly:
Kat Can Cook’s “hungry lady salads” which you can find both on Instagram and in her soon-to-be-released cookbook.
Be broad-minded and creative about your ingredients– as my friend Brigid put it, “literally anything can be a dressing– Dips, sauces, poorly drained olives, messy cut fruit, etc.”
As you dig into Big Salad Life further, you are going to want to embrace homemade salad dressing. It is so much better than store bought and really easy to make. Start with Nora Ephron’s Heartburn vinaigrette and grow from there.
You know who also has guidance about dressing??? Surprise: it’s Julia Turshen, back with more charts in “On Dressing Salad.”
Chop things finely and mix them well– every piece of salad should be dressed and, when taking a bite, you want to get as many of the different good things into your mouth as possible– “plan something crunchy, creamy, acidic, filling in every bite”, per my friend Elizabeth.
Salads don’t need to be just raw vegetables– you want to add cheeses and nuts, of course, but also dried and fresh fruit, roasted vegetables, cooked grains, any kind of fun crunchy bits you’ve got available– whatever sounds good is worth trying! Leftovers: add them to your salads! Potato chips: add them to your salads! The only thing to avoid? Anything you don’t feel excited to eat.
Quick pickled vegetables are also a great recommended addition.
If you’re the type of person who likes to batch cook (like me!), you can batch prep roasted vegetables, cooked grains, and chopped nuts, veggies, and fruits in one big chunk on the weekend.
But if you don’t like batch cooking, an authority no less august than Jasmine Guillory herself assured me “you do not have to be a meal prep kind of person to be a big salad kind of person! I never meal prep anything and I make big salads frequently!”
Be inventive with your greens! Mix different lettuces, cabbages, and kales. Throw in chopped up herbs liberally— as one person put it “fatoush everything, parsley is lettuce.”
Season (read: salt) your ingredients liberally, and do it in layers or stages rather than one all your ingredients are in the bowl together.
If you’re using a creamy dressing, dress the bowl and then toss the salad into it rather than the other way around. This feels like one of those counterintuitive pieces of advice that always turns out to be especially great.
As my friend Elizabeth put it, “Mentally, accept that it takes TIME. Like as much as any other dinner to make.”
BUT ALSO, if the idea of all that chopping feels overwhelming, Jasmine came through with another clutch piece of advice: “one good rule is to only have one or two things that are labor intensive; so if you’re chopping lots of nuts, use arugula or another lettuce you don’t need to chop, if you’re using kale and Brussels sprouts, use pepitas so you don’t have to chop nuts, rely on cheeses like feta or other crumbly cheeses so that step doesn’t take much time, etc.”
Here are Your Equipment Specific Salad Tips:
If you’re the kind of person who can motivate themselves to make changes by buying things (read: a Taurus or Libra), you should treat yourself to an extra special beautiful bowl or set of bowls especially for serving or for eating salad. In fact, this was brilliant New Yorker food writer Helen Rosner’s first piece of advice: “Get a very very very large bowl to eat salads out of. A nice one. One that feels special– I’m serious get THE BIGGEST bowl.”
Some specific bowls recommended:
A large, shallow stainless steel one, like this. Perfect & utilitarian.
This set of melamine nesting bowls, endorsed by Jasmine Guillory!
And the Popcorn Bowl from East Fork Pottery, if you want something fancy.
Helen also pointed out that having a really nice cutting board and knives you enjoy using is also key.
On that note, make sure your knives are sharp– important in all kinds of cooking, but especially here.
People also like other methods of chopping. Some swear by kitchen scissors, like these, that let you chop your salad in the bowl, while others like choppers like this one (which works on a cutting board or in your bowl) or a box-chopper, like this one from Mueller. And, if you want to make like an Italian grandma or a Chopt employee, you can go in for this classic mezzaluna chopper.
From Jasmine, I was reminded that you want a good box grater and a set of nice microplanes. Something in this vein I saw recommended and to which I’d like to call your attention is this set of Mason jar-compatible microplane lids that let you grate your ingredients directly into a jar for mixing OR containing.
Many people recommended something like “a big container with little containers for ingredients” so you can keep all the elements separate to remix later– as Helen put it, “The key to Big Salad Life is you need your fridge to become a living salad bar.” These come in glass, too.
An easy-to-clean citrus juicer was another recommended gadget– this is the one I got three years ago for making cocktails and I endorse it whole-heartedly.
Per Helen, immersion blenders are “life changing for making dressings.”
Also key for homemade dressings are containers in which to make and keep them. Two recommended: OXO’s little dressing shaker and this Chef’n Emulstir Dressing Mixer.
And finally, that classic kitchen tool the salad spinner got a few shout-outs. This was, without question, the coolest one I saw.
Last But Not Least, we present…
Recommended Recipes and Ingredients:
Ina Garten’s Guacamole Salad was mentioned by name multiple times
Helen Rosner is presently obsessed with this copycat recipe for California Pizza Kitchen’s Thai Crunch Salad, with the following notes: “all cabbage/no lettuce, no bell pepper, double avocado, add chopped cucumber, and sunflower seeds instead of crispy wonton strip”
This miso-sesame vinaigrette that, in its very title, promises to be good on everything.
Rukmini Iyer’s Halloumi and Red Onion Salad with Giant Cous Cous
And, from me, this recipe for making a dupe of Sweetgreen’s Harvest Bowl, my bougie salad of choice. Double the amount of apple!
A loose dressing recipe from my friend Tim: complement your oil with a little soy, vinegar, citrus, and chili oil.
Everyone loves roasted chickpeas
Starkist Tuna Creation Packets, for adding both protein and flavor
Roasted sweet potatoes on every salad
“Good Parmesan cheese,” whatever that means to your palate
Quick pickled beets, cabbage, onions, and carrots all got shout-outs
Goat, feta, blue, and other soft cheeses
Dried cranberries and cherries
Fresh apples, pears, and peaches
“SO MANY TYPES OF NUTS”, which you can roast and then freeze
Little Leaf Farms lettuce, which is “always crispy and happy”
Grains like wild rice, quinoa, cous cous, etc.
Fresh herbs mixed into your salad base– “parsley is lettuce”
Mustard powder or Dijon mustard are your “secret weapons for vinaigrette dressings”
And that’s everything we’ve got for you, friends! May this light your way to Big Salad Life. And please, if you have any favorite salad or dressing recipes, drop them in the comments. We love to see a recipe tip!
We hope the first week of 2024 has treated you kindly, and that all the others follow suit.
XOXO/ Dame Margaret
I eat a Big Salad five days a week at work. My suggestions: Dollar Tree has a line of plastic containers from Betty Crocker or McCormick (depending on your store). I use the 5 cup bowl for my salad and the 1.5 cup bows for ingredients. Speaking of ingredients, did I miss beans/legumes on the list? Garbanzo, black, cannellini, etc. Dressing suggestions you may not have seen: California Olive Ranch Apple Cider Vinegar, Lemonette Lemon Garlic and Noble Made by the New Primal Citrus Zest (I get them at Fresh Thyme, which is similar to Sprouts). I don't get a hot of flavor from the tuna packets except the sweet and spicy or Thai chili flavors. Star Kist also has tuna packets with rice called Smart Bowls: I find it best to heat these for about 30 seconds before adding to salad.
This newsletter was obviously right up my alley!
Roasted beets are incredible easy and add so much life and flavor to a salad. just wrap each individually in tin foil and then roast 400F until easily pierced (for me approx 80 min). Take them out, the skin peels off and chop them up.