Salad-Bar Basics

Salads offer so much opportunity to get your creative cooking juices flowing! Here’s how to get inspired.

The beauty of a salad is that it can be anything you like – a main course, nourishing bowl, side dish, desk lunch, barbecue buffet, picnic fare; casual or elegant, warm or cold, vegetarian or not.

It’s the perfect one-bowl meal, which you can design to suit your personal tastes and hunger level; or, if you’re catering for a crowd, a low-fuss way to accommodate multiple dietary requirements.

So how do you build a salad? Here, we break it down into six basic components: leaf base; grain base; protein; vegetable; topper; dressing. Then it’s simple – just start from the base and work your way up to the dressing, selecting the ingredients in each category as you go to create a unique salad any time.

Of course, you’re not limited to these suggestions for each category. Take inspiration from the local greengrocer or farmers’ market (or your garden) for quality seasonal ingredients. Your salad doesn’t have to contain all the components; there’s complete flexibility to choose to suit the mood and occasion.

LEAF BASE

Pick your leaves. Start your salad with these bases: kale slaw, baby spinach and rocket, cos lettuce and watercress, wombok slaw, or red cabbage.

GRAIN BASE

Add bulk to your leaves with a serving of couscous, quinoa, brown or red rice, noodles or burghul.

PROTEIN