1,612 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 77 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies that are necessary for its operation.
By continuing to browse, you agree to their use (learn more...).

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...

15 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 Comments Lasts posts Follow

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

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

Season to the right level

When you need to salt something—for example, fish fillets before cooking them—you’ll naturally sprinkle them with a pinch of salt using your fingers. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this very ordinary gesture, which is done all the time in the kitchen, and yet there’s a...
October 14^th 20261,6365

How to Properly Fill a Jar

When you have a jar in your kitchen that’s almost empty—flour or almond flour, for example—you’ll probably refill it before it’s completely empty. And that’s a great way to go about it—no one wants to run out of an ingredient right in the middle of a recipe. Once you’ve...
October 2^nd 20261,1455

Serving Temperature for Wine

When it comes to serving wine, you may (like me) have a fairly simple rule of thumb: red wine at room temperature, and white, rosé, and yellow wines in the fridge until it’s time to serve them. It’s very easy to remember, but it’s a bit simplistic, and you’ll see that there’s a much...
September 23^th 20261,2145

Hot Emulsified Sauces

In French cuisine, sauces are a very important part of a recipe—not just a side dish. In fact, they’re so important that, especially since the time of Auguste Escoffier, they’ve been classified into categories. And among these categories are “hot emulsified sauces,” or lukewarm ones. ...
September 9^th 20261,6365

Hot Dishes and Cold Dishes

When plating or serving a dish—whether hot or cold—on a plate, it’s very important to make sure they’re both the right temperature; in other words: if the dish is hot, the plate should be hot, and conversely, if the dish is cold, the plate should be cold. Is this really important? Let’s...
September 2^nd 20261,3973

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other articles you might also like

Is it really necessary to cream egg yolks?

Let’s try and answer a question that crops up in cookery and patisserie, even if it verges on the existential: do the egg yolks in a custard recipe really need to be beaten until pale, or not?
February 28^th 201846 K4.3

Butter doesn't make you fat, unless you eat too much of it.

Whenever I'm discussing cooking and recipes, there is one idea which comes up frequently, like this: "Oh no! But that's got butter in it" (I should add, for the sake of accuracy, that this is something I hear more frequently from women, who are almost all concerned with keeping their figure). ...
March 26^th 201248 K4.5

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 201823 K5

The (small) miracle of béchamel sauce

Making a béchamel sauce is going to confront you with a little miracle that happens every time: You pour milk over a roux, it's very liquid, you stir over a low heat, and then all of a sudden, miracle, the sauce sets, it thickens, you've got your béchamel. Let's see what happened.
August 27^th 202411 K4

The right size of zucchini

When you buy zucchini at the market, you're often offered a wide variety of sizes, from very small to very large. But which ones to choose? Here are a few tips.
September 9^th 202413 K5