We’ve a few tricks up our apron sleeves in the Dinner Ladies kitchen, for how to make sure our salads reach you in pristine condition – fresh, crunchy and textured, with every ingredient tasting simply and deliciously of itself.
Here’s all the insider info on how to treat your greenery / exciting salad bits and bobs. All these tips can be used when you’re making your own salads from scratch, too.
It’s all about the crunch! And making sure it doesn’t turn to sog! So we cook and freeze all the separate ingredients separately to maintain tiptop freshness. So, for example, we’ll keep the quinoa and beetroot, or the pomegranate and grains separate, so they don’t make each other mushy or transfer their colour.
We usually pack nuts and seeds separately, for the same reason… so they keep their crunchy freshness.
Once we’ve cooked all the ingredients – such as grains, seeds, nuts – that we’re mixing together, we’ll snap-freeze them immediately.
When we’ve cooked larger chunks or slices of vegetables (such as beetroot or pumpkin), then we carefully layer the ingredients together, rather than tossing the whole lot vigorously and turning it to a mush!
We will do all those little extras that make a salad truly memorable but are super-time-consuming at home… We’ll toast the nuts (without taking our eyes off them!), pickle beetroot, simmer quinoa or cook pearl couscous for the exact right length of time!
We like to think we’ve nailed the dressings! Because in our pantry cupboard we’re every variety of oil, vinegar, mustard and sauce. Perfect for all flavour combinations.
And, when we’ve whisked up a dressing, we pack it in a separate sachet that you can toss through at home just before serving. Because no one wants a sad and weepy salad that’s been sitting in its own dressing for days!
On the labels we often recommend you add some extra fresh leaves or herbs to the salad just before serving. It’s a want, not a need! All the salads work well on their own, but you can bulk them up (and add even more nutrition) with extra greenery. We can’t add the leaves in at our end, or they’d be limp and sad from the freezer by the time they reached you.
On a hot day, get your salad out of the fridge at the very last minute – it won’t take long to defrost and from there it will come to room temperature quickly.
Defrost our dressings in a mug of warm water and dress the salad at the last minute, right after you’ve tossed in any extra fresh leaves.