Make Your Salads Better Using a Classic Recipe As a Template
For some people, making a good salad is intuitive; for others it is an amazing challenge. Blending and juxtaposing different flavors and textures on top of a pile of leaves may not seem like a daunting task, but it’s easy to get a salad that’s too spicy, too salty, or worst of all, bland.
It doesn’t take a chef’s mind to make a delicious salad. As the Wall Street Journal points out, using a classic salad recipe as a template, you can hone your salad making skills and then create your own perfectly balanced pile of vegetables (and other stuff).
What do I mean by “template”?
To use a salad as a template, you have to get a written recipe, look at each of its ingredients, think about what each of those ingredients brings to the salad bowl, and then think of other ingredients with similar characteristics. As with any good experiment, it is recommended that you only change one variable, that is, the main ingredient, at a time. (You don’t have to be as strict as if you were doing a real scientific experiment – we are preparing dinner, not OLED or something.) You can also add what you think the salad is lacking in nutritional value or taste. Wise.
How to do it
Let’s take one of these leaf icons – we’ll use my favorite wedge – and break it down. The wedge salad contains:
- Quarter head of an iceberg
- Diced tomatoes
- Crispy sliced bacon
- Red onion
- Blue cheese dressing (and maybe some crumbs just in case)
- Garlic
It’s a rich, salty salad and delicious, but you can immediately see some areas that are ripe for modification. If you’re looking for a little more health, the obvious place to start is salad. The iceberg boasts a great crunch, but it’s mostly water. Purple radicchio looks beautiful when cut into a wedge and gives a pleasant bitter note that helps cut through all the fat and salt. You can also make a “deconstructed” wedge out of any chopped salad greens, just be sure to pick something a little heavier as blue cheese and bacon can weigh down the more tender leaves.
As far as other swaps go, the onion department is another part of the recipe worth exploring. Crispy fried shallots or fried garlic cloves add a red onion pungency and a touch of Maillard -style nutty flavor. Green onions or green garlic can (obviously) replace garlic. If you want to go crazy, you can substitute strawberries for tomatoes. It might sound insane at first glance, but they have the same amount of acidity and sweetness, and – if you get hung up on aesthetics – they are also red, which is nice.
The one thing I wouldn’t mess with too much is the blue cheese sauce and bacon. Maybe I could be persuaded to use crunchy prosciutto, but prosciutto is much more expensive than bacon, and frying prosciutto means you are turning that silky fat into oblivion, and the silky fat is at least half a point compared to this particular jerky. from pork.
What other salads could you use?
If you are not good at salad lectures, let me provide a few icons of this genre, as well as some suggested replacements and additions:
Caesar salad
Don’t like anchovies? Use blue cheese in your dressing instead. Or replace the romaine with another sheet (I really only do this during dire novel reviews).
Cobb salad
Hard-boiled eggs are good, but Japanese ramen eggs and miso eggs or egg yolk are even better.
Nicoise salad
Try asparagus instead of regular green beans, and perhaps try fried underyearlings as potatoes. I wouldn’t skip the olives, but I would add gherkins or capers to make it salty.
Watermelon and feta salad
Use another salty cheese like cotijia and add lime or chili powder (or tajine) for added benefit.
Of course, the salad you choose for your template doesn’t have to be “classic” with a capital C. Any salad recipe from a reputable salad source will work for you. Tinker until you get a feel for what works (and what doesn’t), then move on to creating your own vegetable-based creations.