Salads are the poster dishes of health, with their mix of fruits, veggies, or even meat sometimes, and generous helpings of dressing or sauce. Given the unlimited possibilities, the fun part is customizing it with different combinations to create a unique dish that you can use as a restaurant special.
When planning your meal, it’s important to consider the ingredients and portions to ensure that your guests have enough of an appetite until dessert. Since salads can be served at any stage of the meal, it then becomes important for you to know how to portion out your dishes, as well as what kind of ingredients to use.
Salad for Easy Appetizer Recipes
The introductory dish, appetizer salads need to be served in light, small portions. Salads served here are usually composed of greens like lettuce mixed with fruits like tomatoes with either a vinaigrette or cream-based dressing. Easy Appetizer recipes include a basic seaweed salad that most Japanese meals begin with.
Side Salad Dishes
These dishes accompany entree dishes like steaks. They can also serve as a substitute for carb-rich food like rice or potatoes, making it perfect for ketogenic dieters, or those looking to cut back on their sugar intake. Side salads shouldn’t be too flavorful and overpower the dish, since it serves to accentuate the flavors of your main dish. Healthy recipes include our recipe for Soy Garlic Beef Tenderloin Steak with Buttered Asparagus and Quinoa Salad.
Main Course
Salad becomes the star of the meal, which is why it needs to be served in large portions. You can add generous portions of meat at this point, since it will be a standalone dish for guests to enjoy. You can even use pasta or just about any kind of noodle as your base or try healthy recipes that make use of alternatives like quinoa and couscous.
Unlike a side salad where the viand is a separate element, the meat in a main course salad is purposely combined with the salad itself. Try creating an Asian Chicken Salad to impress guests!
Salads as Dessert
Desserts are synonymous to sweet treats to cap off a meal, and a salad that works best for this would be a fruit salad. Sweet salads generally contain a mix of fruits, complemented with gelatin, whipped cream and may even contain sweet accents of candied nuts.
