It's All About Salad! ;)

I don't know why I'm totally into discussing salads with you today. Maybe I'm craving for one??? But anyway the question is this: Do we have a lot of things to learn about salad?

Oh yes, we do buddy! This blog will give you basic know-how about one topic- SALAD.

First things first... Types of Salad.

There are three: Simple salad, Composed salad and Salad plates.

• Simple Salad- composed of one type of salad green:  it can either be a leaf lettuce salad (refer to the different types of salad greens below. there's at least ten you know!), raw or cooked vegetable salad, sprout salad or legume salad 
• Composed Salad- various combination of salad ingredients such as leafy greens, raw and cooked vegetables, sprouts, legumes, rice or pasta and garnish. It is supposed to be a meal in itself. An example would be tuna nicoise. 
• Salad Plates- a variety of dressed salads arranged like a bouquet: mixed green salad, raw and cooked vegetable salads, mushroom salads, legume salads

I won't delve deeper into these three types of salad because it is too technical. Let's just focus our attention to the types of salad greens, which I find quite interesting because salad greens here in the Philippines are quite limited. Usually, we can only find romaine lettuce, iceberg lettuce, cabbage, lollo rosso/verde, watercress, arugula and spinach. But when I worked outside of the country, my eyes bulged out of its socket (figure-of-speech only, don't take it seriously!) when I found out that there are actually more!!!

Have you seen these yet? Let's take a quiz! Tell me at the end of this blog how many out of these leafy greens that I'm going to show you, do you already know.

Oak Leaf Lettuce.

Butter Lettuce.

Baby Beet Greens.

Mache Lettuce.

Mizuna.

Belgian Endive/ Witlof/ Chicory.

Radicchio.

Radicchio variety- Treviso.

Frisee

Escarole.

Aside from the main salad greens, we also have greens which we typically use for garnish. Very effective in making salad plates appealing to the eye.

Rainbow Mix.

Popcorn shoots.

Now... how many out of these are you familiar with? Please tell me below!

Anyway... These salads have one thing in common, they are often served with their corresponding dressing or vinaigrette. What is the difference between the two?

Vinaigrette is usually a whisked emulsion of oil (sunflower oil, vegetable oil, canola oil, blended oil, specialty oil, olive oil etc) and acid (white wine vinegar, red wine vinegar, balsamic, fruit juices, cider vinegar, specialty vinegar such as raspberry or tarragon) plus your choice of herbs/spices/condiments. Mustard is mostly an added condiment because it acts as an emulsifier- an ingredient that would help bind the two unmixable liquids together. When whisking is done properly, mustard will help prevent your vinaigrette from splitting (the situation where you can see the oil rising above the surface of the vinaigrette). Ratio of oil to acid is supposed to be 3:1. Meaning, three parts oil to one part acid. Usually, we use oil with low-smoking point when it comes to salads. In other words, oil that when you heat up in a pan would evaporate faster compared to the oil we use for frying which has high-smoking point (i.e. peanut oil).

Dressings on the other hand are made from either whisked or blended ingredients. It is composed of an oil-base, acid, herbs/spices/condiments and high or low-fat ingredients such as egg yolk (preferably pasteurized to prevent salmonella food-poisoning), heavy cream, creme' fraiche, sour cream, heavy cream, cream cheese and yogurt.

Whether it be the creamy caesar dressing tossed in your crisp, freshly torn romaine lettuce, topped with garlic croutons and shaved parmesan cheese (my favorite!) or the fresh spinach salad with golden raisins, toasted walnuts and strips of grilled chicken breast paired with home-made sherry vinaigrette... you can never go wrong. Try to mix and match flavors using your senses... look at the colors, shapes and texture.Try to imagine how everything will taste in your mouth. Now... go and make one!

*Photos courtesy of Google Images