A Surprisingly Flavorful Green Salad

This recipe’s from my Substack. I don’t normally cross-post, but green salads need all the help they can get! All green salads fall into two camps. Either:

A) It’s a total waste of space, just a bunch of lettuce dressed in a mid vinaigrette, offending no one while disappointing everyone.

or

B) It’s surprisingly good. Dare I say, shockingly good. It may look like it’s just one color. But it certainly doesn’t taste one-note!

The funny thing is, it’s just as easy to make a good green salad as it is to make a bad one. So which green salad are you going to choose? If you’re interested in the shockingly good green salad, there are only 2 things you need to know. The first will make it good. The second will make it surprising. Let’s start with what makes it good:

1) Use a good vinaigrette

Not many people will be totally floored by a good vinaigrette, but a bad one can make for a very dull or unpleasant green salad.

In her article about Via Carota’s insalata verde, Samin Nosrat shares the key to a good dressing: add a little water. Too much vinegar makes a dressing unpleasantly acidic, but balancing it out with more oil makes it too heavy. Water is just the thing.

This is a great tip for a green salad or any salad with ingredients that are not particularly juicy. On the other hand, for a salad with lots of tomatoes, peaches, cucumbers, or other watery produce, the produce contributes its own water. In those cases, I recommend skipping the water in the dressing and just being careful not to over-dress it.

For this green salad, you’d better believe we’re putting water in the dressing. You can still add a handful of tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers, or other veg to this salad. But we aren’t adding so many water-heavy ingredients that we’ll need to omit the water in the dressing.

2) Use leafy green herbs in place of some of the lettuce

This is the key to a surprisingly (shockingly!) good green salad. Just because it’s all green leaves doesn’t mean it all has to be lettuce.

The most standard way to accomplish this is with a good amount of fresh basil. Use whatever lettuce you have, as long as it’s crisp and fresh (ideally not spring mix, which almost always wilts immediately), and throw in a big handful of whole or torn basil leaves.

Everyone will be completely shocked by what they’re tasting. Like, how is this giant bowl of lettuce so good??

But you don’t have to stop at basil—any combination of leafy herbs you love will work great. Dill, parsley, cilantro, chives, mint. Leave them whole (just remove any thick stems) or tear them coarsely instead of chopping them. That’s what creates the fun surprise—leafy herbs look almost like lettuce leaves.

I recommend staying away from rosemary, thyme, sage, and oregano here. Those woodier, more perfumy herbs are not super pleasant to take a big bite of and work much better in smaller, more finely minced doses. For those woody herbs, I usually chop them up and add them to a dressing instead.

What else can you add to a green salad?

With ingredients this flavorful, you won’t need to add anything else. But if you feel like it, you can absolutely throw in a few halved tomatoes, some thinly sliced radishes, or some cucumber pieces. Keep the topping light and let the herbs and greens shine through.

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* If you’re not used to using and combining fresh herbs in this way, I recommend starting with just basil. You can’t go wrong with it. I have never discovered the limit of “too much basil” in a salad like this (and I’m not convinced it exists).