Olive oil or grape-seed oil? Iceberg or kale? Chopped or not chopped? The best salads are the ones that take a stance.
Salads tend to bring out the opinions. Strong opinions. Just like everyone has a go-to Sweetgreen order, everyone has a technique for throwing together a vinaigrette without measuring anything—and a conviction about whether kale should be massaged, wilted, torn, or cut into a chiffonade for the best salad results.
In this collection, we’ve brought together some of our favorite contentious ideas about salads (Iceberg lettuce isn’t that bad for you! Pasta’s better when it’s cold. Wilting is a good thing!) with a few fresh ways of thinking about them. We’ll help you make your potatoes smokier, chicken juicier, garnishes crunchier. Because salads are better when they come with an opinion.
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In Support of a Wilty Salad
When it comes to salad greens, a kiss of heat can be a good thing.
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Eat More Vegetables. To Get There? Make Better Salad Dressing.
Making good salad dressing is one great balancing act. Fat and acid must align. Add too much and everything goes limp. Add too little, it’s dry.
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Pasta: It's Better Cold
Pasta salad, universally loved and debatably not Italian-American in origin, is worth more than the convenience it offers at picnics and barbecues.
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Stalking a Celery Salad. The Best Celery Salad.
This is not tossing. This is assembling, fashioning, architecting. With the help of chef Ignacio Mattos.
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A Cabinet Full of Crunch
For Alison Roman, the author of Dining In, no meal is complete without a sprinkle of something crunchy.
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It’s Not Just Salad, It’s Salatim
Meaning “salad” and served at most meals, salatim are Israel’s connective tissue.
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Defending the Honor of America’s Most Disparaged Vegetable
Think iceberg lettuce is nutritionally bankrupt? Turns out, it’s actually not much worse than other lettuces.