The Most Overlooked, Yet Obvious, Tip For A Balanced Salad

Salads often get a bad rap, but they're a great way to enjoy a light meal that doesn't weigh you down for the rest of the day, especially during the summer, and if you know what you're doing, they taste great, too. The best part is you can construct them well ahead of time; just add dressing and you're good to go. Salads are so versatile; you can add whatever ingredients you want to get whatever flavor profile you desire.

Only, maybe it shouldn't quite be "whatever ingredients you want." There are a lot of mistakes people can make when making a salad, but the biggest one might be this: At a certain point, you really need to stop adding ingredients to the bowl. There are only so many different flavors a salad can contain before it inevitably becomes a dangerously unbalanced mess. The key with salads, as with so many things in the culinary world, is that you want flavors that work in harmony. When you add too many ingredients, you're setting up a war for your taste buds.

The last thing you want when composing any dish is to create a flavor miasma. This really is a case where less is more because the more ingredients you add, the more likely you make it that none of them will matter. Either you're going to have one component with such a strong flavor that it overwhelms everything else, or you're going to create a flavor and texture mishmash where you taste so many things at once that you can't taste all of them.

There's a reason thoughtful dish composition is so important to any restaurant menu. You have to pick ingredients that complement each other both in terms of flavor and texture — and keep the overall count to a minimum. Sure, you usually want more than just lettuce and croutons, but you have to make sure you know when to pump the brakes. Too many cooks spoil the broth, and too many ingredients spoil the salad.

Salads aren't the only type of food where this rule applies; generally, you never want a dish to be too busy. This is particularly a problem when it comes to burgers and sandwiches. So many restaurants now seem to think the rule to a good burger or sandwich means so many different ingredients that you shouldn't be able to actually fit it in your mouth without unhinging your jaw like a python. This is arguably worse than when you add too many ingredients to a salad because while it still suffers from the same flavor issues as a salad, you're adding the problem of your food being challenging to eat.

So often in cooking, the key is not just knowing what to add but what to subtract. Just be sure to compose your salads thoughtfully, with an eye toward a specific theme, and you'll be okay.