This article opens the veil of the secrets of cooking salads. Recipes with photos describe in detail the cooking process and make you take a fresh look at the familiar dishes that have already become traditional companions of the main dishes.
Kinds
Cooking salads for every housewife every year becomes something akin to a military campaign: immediately looking for new recipes, ideas, options. Indeed, from year to year it is boring and ordinary to put the same thing on the table. Then a food trip is made, some are sometimes difficult to find if the recipe is intricate. Well, in the end, immediately upon serving, a feeling of victory or defeat, depending on the facial expressions of those who eat and the exclamations that follow it. All salads are divided into several types:
- Traditional, in which the ingredients are mixed in one bowl and poured with sauce.
- Puff salads, which also include cocktail salads.
- Fruit and berry, which can be sweet or containing meat, vegetables or seafood.
- Warm salads, which are often served as the main course. They can include a wide variety of ingredients: from vegetables, mushrooms and meat to pasta, rice and fruits.
- Raw-food salads in which there are no products that underwent any heat treatment.
Also, all salads are divided into high-calorie (with mayonnaise, cheese), low-calorie (for example, Caprese salad) and vegan, which do not use animal products (sour cream, eggs, meat, fish, etc.).
Traditional salad with unusual ingredients
This salad recipe refers to a new generation of cuisine called fusion, which uses seemingly incompatible products in one dish. The composition of this salad includes:
- 400 grams of smoked meat, better than chicken. Important: peels should not be on it. Cut the meat into small cubes.
- 200 grams of canned corn and pineapple (which can be taken fresh if there is no other). Pineapples are cut into small pieces.
- Grate 180 grams of hard cheese with large holes.
- One pod of bell pepper, it should be cleaned from seeds and cut into small squares.
- 6 tbsp. tablespoons of mayonnaise to mix salad.
We mix all the ingredients in one dish, mix and put in a salad bowl, decorating with a pineapple ring with a thin circle of pepper. Salad at first glance (or a bite) seems strange, but if you look at the gamut of taste, feel it, then it is impossible to tear yourself away from the dish.
Express salad with crackers
Instant salads are becoming more and more solid both in everyday life and in the festive menu, when you want to surprise guests with a variety of dishes, and there is not enough time for cooking. One of these recipes is a salad with crackers, which is very fond of young people, either for crunchy properties, or for the composition. Smoked sausage, hard cheese, fresh tomatoes and small bread croutons are required in equal proportions for cooking. Cheese and sausage are cut into small cubes, tomatoes are cut into medium-sized pieces, everything is smeared with mayonnaise and, immediately before serving, sprinkled with crackers and slightly mixed.
Puff salad "a la Mercury"
This type of salad speaks for itself: layered, so its components are laid out on top of each other in the form of layers, each of which is smeared with sauce. The design of the salad plays an important role: it can simply be a puff slide, a barrel or more complex forms in the form of various forms (herringbone, head or animal as a whole, flower or butterfly). This recipe consists of a small number of products, so you can simply lay it out in layers using a small detachable shape, giving the salad the appearance of a cylinder. Step by step preparation of salad includes the following steps:
- Mix one hundred grams of unsweetened yogurt with 1 teaspoon of mustard and a pinch of salt. With this sauce every layer of salad will be smeared.
- Cut one boiled chicken breast into small cubes and put half on the bottom of the salad bowl. Seven prunes cut into strips and lay on top of the meat. Next comes a layer of fresh cucumber, also sliced, and then two boiled eggs, diced, on top of which is another layer of meat.
Decorate the top with fresh cucumbers and prunes, giving them the shape of a flower, and immediately serve.
Shrimp Cocktail Salad
This type of feed is called verrine (from the French verre - glass). Salad ingredients layered in large transparent glasses have long won the hearts of buffs, buffets and just big companies with various kinds of treats.
Verrin looks very impressive in the photo, and the preparation of the salad takes very little time, if you use ready-made products. One of these verrine dishes is an Italian shrimp salad, which is rightly considered a gourmet find. To prepare it you need:
- Boil 200 grams of shrimp in salted water for no more than 2-3 minutes, otherwise they will become hard and tasteless. Already ready to peel and put in a mixture of ketchup and mayonnaise, 100 grams each, also add two chopped cloves of garlic to the mixture. Let the shrimp soak in taste.
- Two fleshy tomatoes cut into small pieces.
- Cut two or three boiled eggs into half rings, and grate 120 grams of hard cheese.
At the bottom of the glass we place a layer of tomatoes, on top of which we lay out a layer of chopped eggs, then pour shrimp sauce and sprinkle cheese on top. We spread the shrimp to the very top, slightly sprinkle with lime juice. This instant salad can be decorated with a sprig of fresh herbs or olive.
Warm salad for a light dinner
This is the case when one dish can replace an entire lunch or dinner consisting of several dishes. Warm salads undeservedly remain in the shade compared to their mayonnaise relatives, although in terms of useful qualities they are many times superior to them. To prepare the salad, boil 500 grams of green beans, no more than five minutes - it should remain dense and slightly crispy, without losing its rich color.
Next, cut 300 grams of chicken into thin small strips, fry in 2-3 tbsp. tablespoons of vegetable oil, in the process sprinkled with black pepper to taste, as well as salt. When the meat is ready, take it out to a plate, and fry one onion, chopped with a thin straw, on the remaining oil. In the process, it is worth adding one bell pepper, cut into strips, and stirring, bring to softness. Combine meat, vegetables and beans, pour sauce made from 2 tbsp. tablespoons of balsamic vinegar and the same amount of pure water, you can add a spoonful of olive oil.
"Vegan's Dream"
Cooking delicious salads should not be combined with violence against living creatures or their killing, say vegans. Therefore, their food always carries only positive emotions. Raw spinners can take vegan spinach salad in their recipe book, since all the ingredients do not undergo heat treatment, preserving a host of useful trace elements and vitamins. To make a salad you will need:
- 1 green apple
- 1 large bunch of fresh spinach, frozen is not suitable, you can also add leaves of green salad;
- several branches of dill and parsley;
- 3-4 tbsp. tablespoons of cheese oil from olives or sesame;
- a pinch of salt and sugar;
- 1 tbsp. a spoonful of lemon juice.
A salad is prepared in two accounts: rinse all the greens and dry with paper, cut the spinach into strips 1-1.5 cm thick, and finely chop the dill and parsley. Cut the apple into strips, after removing the core and seeds. In a cup, mix oil, lemon juice and spices, optionally you can add a little mustard for a pungent taste. Beat the mixture lightly. In a salad bowl, mix greens with apples, pour sauce and immediately serve. There hasn't been such an explosion at food receptors for a long time!
Fruit Miracle: Sweet Salad for Dessert
Salads are not only vegetable and meat, but also sweet, served for dessert or as a healthy breakfast. The simplest in composition, but attractive for children’s eyes salad in orange will give the child not only a pleasant taste sensation, but also a feeling of incomparable thrill from a beautiful object.
Salad preparation method:
- Cut two large oranges into halves together with the peel, and then carefully select the pulp with a spoon or knife, trying not to damage the skin of the fruit: these will be “salad bowls”. The edges of these plates can be figured out with scissors for greater effect.
- Cut a large ripe banana into half rings, pulp of an orange into small pieces, removing white veins, and peel a sweet apple and cut into small cubes.
- Mix fruit slices in a plate. At the half of the pomegranate, remove the seeds and add a part to the salad, and leave a little to decorate the dish. Next, you need a sauce: it can be 200 grams of sweet yogurt or 100 grams of vanilla ice cream - to choose from. Add to the salad, mix lightly and put in the molds from oranges, forming a hill, which we sprinkle with the remaining pomegranate seeds and decorate with a leaf of fresh mint.
Salad "Madame de Pompadour"
The recipe for the salad of the famous favorite was kept a secret for a long time, but over time, even the most secret will always become apparent.
The love salad, as it was called at court, is quite simple, but due to the combination of products, it ultimately gives a powerful stimulus of an intimate nature. For a salad you will need quite a bit:
- 200 grams of hard cheese;
- one at a time: an apple and raw carrots;
- six quail eggs (in the extreme, you can replace with chicken);
- one onion;
- mayonnaise, which was only in fashion at the time.
The preparation of the salad is reduced to chopping the products on a coarse grater, while the onions are finely chopped and boiled with boiling water so that the bitterness inherent in it is gone. All ingredients are mixed in a salad bowl and smeared with mayonnaise sauce. A more refined serving involves laying out the salad in layers, alternating them with a layer of sauce.