Best Kale Salad Recipe - Cooking Classy (2024)

FAQs

How do you make kale taste better? ›

“Minced garlic, olive oil, and salt are also simple ingredients that can transform the flavor of a bitter kale dish. ' “Cutting the stem of kale and marinating it with olive oil and salt can help reduce bitterness.”

Curly Kale Is the Best Type of Kale for Salads

You'll probably recognize curly kale from the grocery store produce section. Curly kales, as the name suggests, have frilly-edged leaves and long stems.

Mix with sweets: combining kale with naturally sweet-tasting foods such as fruits, or sweet-tasting spices can help mask some of its bitterness. Add a touch of salt or spices: spicy and salty flavors can also tame some of kale's strong bitterness. Try cooking kale in vegetable broth with a touch of chili flakes.

Bitter greens are leafy greens or vegetables that have an intense bitter flavor profile. They include kale, mustard greens, collards, turnip greens, broccoli rabe, radicchio, chicory, and endive. The bitterness comes from chemical compounds called glucosinolates that can be found in the Brassica family.

The foods that help reduce bitterness are: Salt while cooking and/or while eating (like on bitter salad greens) Sweet or Spicy. Sour or Acids like lemon or vinegar.

Add Sweet to Kale: Sweet foods go well with kale because they counter its rather bitter taste. Serve curly kale up as a salad with simple ingredients like a blood orange, mango and slivered almonds or apple, feta and toasted walnuts or cook kale up with caramelized onion.

Raw kale is fibrous, bitter and can be tough to chew. Blanching it helps soften its fibers and bitterness while making it easier to chew.

Restaurants salt their salads.

This resulted in every bite tasting vibrant and flavorful. "Season your salad just like you would anything else," Simpson said. "Salt is a big difference between salads at home and salads in a restaurant." This doesn't mean you have to make your salads salty!

The Keys to Crisp Lettuce

Lettuce actually needs a good amount of airflow, in addition to a bit of moisture (but not too much!), in order to stay crisp. That's why restaurants store their lettuce in special perforated bins that allow for air circulation while it's held in the fridge.

What are 5 components of a satisfying salad? ›

There are five elements to a perfect salad: greens, sweetness, creaminess, crunchiness, and dressing.

RELATED: Believe It Or Not, Kale Actually Lives Up To All Of Its Hype—Here's Why. Manganiello says you can eat kale every day, just don't overdo it. She recommends one to two servings maximum of kale per day, leaving room for other healthy foods that provide an assortment of nutrients.

Use your hands to toss the greens, massaging/rubbing the vinaigrette into the kale a bit as you toss. Taste and correct the seasoning with salt and pepper. Let the salad sit for at least 10 minutes before serving. Even better—if time allows, cover the salad, and let it sit in the fridge for 30 minutes to an hour.

Kale has the buzz. But collard greens — kale's first cousin — are still uncommon. Standard fare in the American South, in the rest of the nation many are unfamiliar with these large, flat, oval, white-ribbed leaves. Yet they are nutritional superstars equal to if not surpassing kale!

Massaging kale for salad makes the vegetable more palatable by releasing its bitter compounds and—as a result—making the kale less bitter. This simple process breaks down the vegetable's fibrous texture, making it more tender, easier to chew, and more digestible.