I Never Make a Single Salad Without Adding THIS

You know that feeling you get when you’re at a restaurant and you order a salad and it’s so good? And then when it’s gone you think to yourself, “that’s why I never make salads at home. They just never taste like that when I do it myself.” Well, one of the reasons that a chef-made salad is so great is a really easy practice that you do every time you cook anyway: They sprinkle the salad with salt. 

It’s certainly true that restaurant salads often involve more work and ingredients than one person wants to do at home, but that’s not the only reason salads you pay for are better than salads you’ve made. Well-seasoned food is the foundation of what makes a dish great, and that applies to salads as much as it does to a pan-seared steak or a fancy pasta dish.

For years I bought into two illusions that kept my salads from being truly stellar — that salad is seasoned by dressing and therefore doesn’t need any extra salt and that salting fresh greens is somehow wrong or excessive. I never saw recipes calling for salt on raw greens, and no one ever taught me to do it, so it seemed unnecessary to me. I was incorrect on both counts. 

Salad is, of course, flavored by the dressing it’s tossed in, but — just as in any other dish — every element needs to be well seasoned for the whole dish to taste well-seasoned, and that includes the greens. Secondly, salting raw greens may seem a little unnecessary or even counterintuitive at first, but once you give it a try for yourself I promise you’ll notice a difference. And maybe you will even be encouraged to make more satisfying salads for yourself at home that can rival anything that came from a restaurant kitchen. 

• Salt at the end. Add the greens and dressing, plus any other ingredients you want to be hit with the salt, like fresh tomatoes for example, to a large bowl (even if you’re tossing a small amount of veg, you want lots of room in the bowl), Sprinkle with salt and toss until everything is well coated in dressing. Taste, and add more salt if needed. Always toss with the dressing! It’ll both help the salt adhere to the greens and allow you to taste everything together, so you don’t accidentally over salt.
• Start with just a little. You can always add, but you can never take away. When making enough salad for one or two people I start with a big pinch, and work my way up from there as necessary. How much salt you ultimately use will depend on the salinity of the dressing, what kind of salt you’re using, and personal taste.
• Flaky sea salt is a great choice. Most restaurant salads are finished with flaky sea salt, which has a larger surface area and gives the salad a pleasant salty crunch. If you don’t have any on hand, kosher salt is the next best thing.