No one will argue: bunches of greens, cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, washed and laid whole on a platter, will decorate any festive and everyday table. But there are vegetables and herbs that are almost never consumed as a whole – radish, for example, or celery root, you just can’t serve it on the table!
Salads should not be forgotten for another reason. Other substances contained in vegetables and root crops (for example, carotene in carrots) are much better absorbed in combination with salad dressing. There are salads that are seasonal, others are prepared all year round.
- Whatever the salad is – very simple, hastily cooked, or complex, festive – there are rules according to which you need to cook it. First of all, my vegetables. How? Root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets and turnips) – with a brush.
- Salad, sorrel, my spinach in a basin, in cold water, “afloat”. At the same time, we change the water several times. Dill and cucumbers are washed only before serving, otherwise they lose their aroma and quickly deteriorate. The vegetables for the salad need to be cooked ahead of time so that they cool down well before we start cutting them. Hard-boiled eggs for salad must be cooked for at least ten minutes.
- Bean and pea pods should be immersed in highly boiling, salted water to preserve the green color.
- Salads from boiled vegetables should be cut chilled, then they do not spoil so quickly, they are not small crumbs. Cut vegetables into a salad evenly and thinly, the slices should literally show through! Then they are well impregnated with the dressing and will create a “bouquet” characteristic of the salad. When all the products are put in a salad bowl, then everything must be mixed carefully and carefully: with movements from the bottom up, so as not to break or crush thin slices.
- The salad is ready, seasoned and stacked in a salad bowl. Now you can decorate it. Slices of ruddy apples and mouth-watering pieces of fish and meat are also suitable for decoration. We decorate the salad only with those products that are included in the salad. The exception is parsley, dill and celery.
- A salad laid out in a high slide and decorated with a “mesh” of mayonnaise looks very nice. In general, everyone usually has enough imagination to decorate. And these are fungi from a hard egg and halves of a tomato, stripes of red sweet pepper, a spiral of apples or an orange … everything is fine, the main thing is to observe the measure.
