1,559 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

Toss the salad

When you've finished preparing a salad, green or otherwise, it's usually time to add the dressing and toss.
It's often said to "toss the salad", which means to season and mix.

Is it easy? Not so easy...

13 K 5/5 (2 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Tips Tricks Salad Dressing Mixing Cutlery Hands

Last modified on: March 8^th 2024

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

Toss the salad

Imagine, your salad bowl is well filled, almost full, with the delicious salad you've just prepared, and you're about to sit down to dinner, so you need to add the dressing, and above all mix it well so that all the dressing is evenly distributed over the salad.

So what's the problem? you might be thinking, just pour in the dressing and toss.

tourner une salade avec des couverts

In principle, of course, there's nothing revolutionary about it, but in practice, it's not so easy, especially if you have large pieces in your salad, for example a green salad with its leaves whole, not cut into chiffonade.

Pouring the dressing over it is no problem, but mixing it is not so easy. Naturally, you use your (salad) cutlery and try to do the best you can to mix it.
There's no secret about it, though: there's a big risk of getting a lot of sauce on the side (especially if the salad bowl is quite full), and it's very easy to get a few drops of sauce on your clothes.
When we were kids, my grandmother used to let us toss the salad, and we loved it. When we succeeded, she'd take one look at the contents of the salad bowl and say "You're ready for your wedding!" Maybe yours is too?

But let's face it, this cutlery method isn't very efficient, nor very quick, so how can we do it any other way?

Let's take a look at what's done in restaurants: they make all kinds of salads, and how do they turn them?

tourner salade à la main

It's both simple and ultra-efficient: they pour the dressing over the salad, often in a high-sided container, and then a cook stirs the whole thing with his or her hands, often gloved, which takes a few seconds for a perfectly turned salad, which is then arranged on the serving plates.

It's as simple as I said, you just don't have to be afraid of getting your hands "sauced".

To sum up: to turn a salad quickly and efficiently, it's best to go at it with both hands.

Lasts posts

XO Cognac Explained: Meaning, Aging, and Flavor Profile

XO Cognac always goes beyond the labels on the bottle: it is often associated with tradition and quality. You get to appreciate the artistry, character and ageing process when you understand what defines this smooth Cognac. The section below tackles everything about XO Cognac, from complex flavour...
January 28^th 20261,162 Sponsored article

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20252,7235

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20251,7325

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 20251,580

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20255,4375

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

The march forward

When professionals get to work in their kitchen, lab or bakery, they are (if they are conscientious) very sensitive to hygiene and cleanliness. It is impossible for a good baker for example to do a day's work without regularly cleaning the table where he or she works, and it is even more...
June 30^th 202120 K5

Coarsely chopped herbs

Although we are in the middle of winter as I write these lines, you should not hesitate to make salads at this time, it is actually quite simple, rather fast, and so pleasant. A while ago, I already told you that a salad is a salad, but a salad with herbs is immediately something much better:...
January 9^th 202115 K4.9

The beautiful story of the croissants

As you may have already noticed, cooking, baking and pastry-making are full of stories or legends, usually very romantic, about this or that product or recipe. This is often the case for named recipes, for example tarte tatin, peach melba, paris-brest and many others, but it also applies to very...
October 10^th 201820 K5

85 grams of eggs?

Some time ago, I already spoke to you about the difference between baking and pastry-making, I emphasized, among other things, the precision of pastry-making which requires grams, cm, degrees and minutes. That's why, on the one hand, you have baking and cooking, where a certain tolerance is...
November 26^th 201857 K4.6

The so-called "nervous" meats

You've probably heard this before, we're talking about "nervous" meat, or meat with nerves, to describe what is indicated by the blue arrow on the left. This is a piece of beef, and what we call a nerve is not a nerve, it is in fact collagen (chemists sometimes call it a "collagen sink"), a...
April 16^th 202138 K4.5