How to build a great salad

Salads have been on our tables since Greek and Roman times. The word comes from the Latin sal (salt), via salata, "salted" - the raw vegetables eaten with a dressing of oil, vinegar and salt.

Knowing how to build a great salad is a valuable culinary skill, just like knowing how to make a great dressing. You can make a delicious, nutritious meal out of a few ingredients, and they don't all need to be fresh either. Canned and jarred foods like lentils and artichokes, or some cooked grains, make your salad go further and add flavour, texture and more nutrients. It's also a great way to use up leftovers — like roasted vegetables or chicken from a Sunday dinner.

Nutritionally, salads can be brilliant too. You can build in fibre-rich foods like wholewheat pasta or chickpeas, add several of your five-a-day with leaves and vegetables, and then top with lean proteins like tuna or egg, and dress it all with olive oil, rich in heart healthy fats.

So, to learn the key to a great salad, I asked our chef Matt for his tips. Here's what Matt had to say:

Layer, season and balance

⁠For me, a great salad is constructed. The ingredients are layered, seasoned and balanced, and once you understand a few of the principles you can design one from scratch, or conjure one out of whatever's in the fridge.

Here's how I approach it. The whole idea is contrast - getting soft, crisp, crunchy and creamy into the same spoonful, with the flavours balanced alongside.

For example: roast wedges or cubes of squash in a hot oven with a little oil until the edges catch and turn sweet; toast a handful of hazelnuts in a dry pan until they smell nutty and crush them roughly; add very thinly sliced fennel; then crumble over salty feta and pile the lot onto peppery rocket with a lemony olive oil dressing and a handful of picked herbs. Soft, crunchy, creamy and crisp, all in a single forkful.

Start with the body

Start with the body, not necessarily the leaves. Many salads feature leaves, herbs among them, but a salad wants a bit of backbone if it's going to be substantial and nourishing rather than a garnish. These are the tender, satisfying parts that make a salad worth eating.

• Pulses are a great place to begin: lentils, chickpeas and beans are cheap, high in fibre and protein, and genuinely filling. Tinned is fine - just rinse them well and buy the best quality you can find.
• Grains do a similar job: spelt, freekeh, pearl barley, brown rice and quinoa all bring a nutty chew and more fibre, and are great at holding onto a dressing.
• Roasted vegetables are lovely on their own or alongside those grains and pulses. Squash, peppers, tomatoes, beetroot, cauliflower and pretty much any root turn soft and sweet as roasting concentrates their flavour.

Naturally creamy ingredients earn their place too - a ripe avocado, a spoon of thick yoghurt or hummus, a crumble of feta, ricotta or goat's cheese, or a slab of grilled halloumi. They add richness and protein along with that creamy texture. And a protein tips the whole thing into a proper meal: a soft- or hard-boiled egg, some leftover roast chicken, a tin of good fish, tofu, or a little meat or fish.

You don't need all of these - just two or three, chosen so they each do a different job, and you've already got the basis of a meal.⁠

Next: crisp and fresh

With the body in place, layer in the crisp and fresh: a mix of leaves and soft herbs, raw vegetables sliced thin like fennel, radish, cucumber and celery, and maybe a little fruit for sharpness and sweetness — apple, pear or pomegranate. These are the ingredients that bring a salad to life.

And then, crunch

The crunch is one of the easiest ways to elevate a salad. Scatter it over right at the end so it keeps its bite:

• Toasted nuts and seeds
• Toasted breadcrumbs, broken toasted flatbreads or croutons
• Crisp fried shallots
• Vegetable crisps or roasted pulses

Balance your flavours

For flavour, you're balancing salt, acid, fat, sweetness and bitterness. Salt and acidity are where a salad really comes alive, so be generous with a pinch of flaky salt and make the dressing a touch sharper than you might expect — it lifts everything else.

The fat matters just as much, and it usually comes from the dressing. A good extra virgin olive oil is hard to beat, though a cold-pressed rapeseed oil or a nut oil like walnut all bring their own character. It carries the flavours, rounds off the sharpness and gives everything a glossy richness.

Herbs and aromatics help a lot here. Soft herbs like parsley, mint, basil, dill and coriander are best thrown in by the handful and treated as a leaf rather than a garnish. Aromatics season from underneath: a little thinly sliced shallot or red onion softened in the acid of the dressing, some lemon, lime or orange zest, a pinch or a few slices of fresh chilli, or a warming spice blend to give a final lift.

Building and dressing

Season and dress your components as you go, rather than only at the end. Season the grains, season the roast veg, and taste as you layer.

Then dress things in order:

• Sturdy stuff — roast roots, pulses and grains — takes its dressing early and soaks it up, ideally while still warm.
• Delicate leaves and herbs get dressed lightly at the last moment so they stay crisp.
• Crunchy things go on top so they keep their crunch.
• Anything creamy gets drizzled or spooned over right at the end.

A salad built this way is a brilliant thing to put in front of people. Most of it can be made ahead, so there's no last-minute panic: cook the grains, roast the veg, rinse and dress the pulses, wash the leaves, and keep everything separate until you're ready to serve. Then it all comes together in a couple of minutes.

It's also one of the best ways to use up leftovers — a bit of roast chicken from the night before, half a tin of beans, or the last of a bag of leaves all find a home here. Best of all, once the layering becomes second nature you can put the recipes aside and start building salads from whatever's to hand. That's when you can really get creative.