If salads are your go-to lunch when it gets too hot to eat anything else, here’s a quick guide on how to prep your salad leaves for the perfect salad every single time.
How often have you brought home fresh greens and different salad leaves to make a big bowl of salad, but it just never turns out to be the same like the ones you eat at restaurants and cafés? The trick to transforming your salads from a sad, soggy, pile of leaves to one that is crisp, fresh, and so full of flavour lies in prepping the salad leaves correctly.
Here are a few of my favourite tips to prep salad leaves when you’re tossing up a salad —
- Clean your salad leaves! No one likes gritty leaves in a mouthful. Trim the stems and run them under water to clean them first. Then, and here comes the pro tip — dunk them in iced water for a few minutes! This helps make them crunchy, and can revive old leaves too. So if you have a bag of leaves that has been sitting in your fridge for a few days, iced water can help bring some life into them. This tip works for herbs too!
- Drain & dry well: You don’t want any of that excess water in your salad as it can make it soggy, and just straining isn’t enough. Use a salad spinner to dry the salad leaves [I got mine from Ikea]. You could also pat them dry with a kitchen towel, but I find salad spinners to be the most effective, and can really make a difference in your quality of salads.
- What’s the worst part about a salad? Or, any meal, really? Lack of seasoning. Salad specially gets a bad rep for being bland or tasteless, and under seasoning is a major reason (among others). An easy way to make sure your salad will be perfectly seasoned, is to dip a salad leaf into the dressing and taste! Usually just tasting the dressing on its own will make you think the salt is enough, but once it’s tossed with the leaves, you might want a bit more. Tasting the leaf with the dressing helps you correctly gauge and adjust the seasoning.
- Finally, dress your salad right before you’re going to serve it. Adding the dressing from before makes everything wilted and soggy, and we don’t want that. Drizzle the dressing and toss gently (use your hands if you need to), to make sure everything is well coated, and serve immediately.
These easy steps can truly transform your salad and make it restaurant quality each time you make it at home! Enjoy!
Watch the video on how we prep our salad leaves:
