The Ultimate Salad Guide
This is a complete salad handbook explaining different types of salads and how to make salads that everyone will want to eat and enjoy. You will learn about the basic ingredients of salads, how to prepare them, plus the garnishes and enhancements, those little extras that make them so awesome! Finally, the "pièce de résistance," the dressing, or sauce that perfectly finishes the salad. Links to famous, classic, and traditional French salads are included, with storage tips and troubleshooting issues resolved.

Keep this salad guide “handy” so it can be conveniently referred to. Use the red heart ❤️️ on the right side of this post to bookmark this page to make it easy to find.
Jump to:
- The Ultimate Salad Guide
- ❤️Why Do People Love Salads?
- 😋Salads Need A Balance Of Flavors And Textures
- 🥗How Many Types Of Salads Are There?
- 🥬️Best Green Salads
- 🥕Vegetable Salads
- 🥩Protein Salads Make Perfect Salad Dishes For Supper
- 🎨Visual Step-by-Step Guide
- 🔢Steps To Prepare A Salad
- 🌿Herbs Are The Leafy Luster of Flavor
- 🧄The Alliums Line Up
- 🪄Salad Garnishes and Enhancements
- 🍾Types Of Dressings For Salads
- 🫙Sensational Mayonnaise Dressing
- 🥗How To Toss A Salad
- ❄️Storage Tips
- Top Tips For Salad Making
- 📚Resources
- 🛠Troubleshooting Tips
- ❔FAQ
- 👩🏻🔬 Food Safety For All Types Of Salads
❤️Why Do People Love Salads?
When you truly understand the beauty of this exquisite food type your dining experience will be enriched!
Salads are a popular food in our modern-day menu for good reasons.
- They can be enjoyed and prepared with fresh vegetables, fruits, grains, proteins, and dairy covering all the major food groups and providing a comprehensive package of nutrients.
- The quality of the ingredients is the central factor in making French salads. It builds the foundation for a successful dish.
- Eating salads daily can be a good way to build and maintain health.
- But people like to eat salad not just for the health benefit no indeed, many people love to eat salads daily because they are delicious!
- They can be light, refreshing, filling, satisfying, inexpensive to make, or richer, with an endless variety of flavors and textures.
- If salads are only experienced as a bowl of leafy greens recklessly drizzled with a sauce, then it is easy to understand why some people comment that they are boring and steer clear from them.
But the Mediterranean cuisine salads featured here on this site have always been a mainstay of life and for good reasons.
😋Salads Need A Balance Of Flavors And Textures
Salad ingredients are often chosen with flavors providing contrasting experiences for the taste buds like savory and sweet, tangy or tart, and sometimes even bitter can add a lovely touch of “Ooo la la”!
Pickled, marinated, and fermented vegetables are an excellent way to add interest and zest to your salads.
Try this Mediterranean Artichoke Salad for a lovely introduction to a fabulous vegetable and use marinated artichokes which can be purchased in a jar, it is an easier start to this fantastic vegetable if you have never eaten them before.
An important component of salad that makes it so loved is that texture matters.
The crunch of the vegetables and additions like croutons mixed with the softer texture of cheese and meat impact the experience of eating great salad.
Salads provide creative opportunities!
🥗How Many Types Of Salads Are There?
A Great Many, Let’s Look At 4
Here at Love French Food, we bring you a full range of salads.
Some of the best salads are very simple with only a few ingredients. Some are full of a whole cluster of colorful, tasty vegetables.
You will discover here on this site many salad ideas for supper or light salad recipes for lunch.
Note
All categories below make different types of greens for vegetarian diets. Simply omitting the meat, eggs, and dairy, and adding the proteins you want will make very satisfying meals.
🥬️Best Green Salads
Simple green salads that are most easy and quick to put together.
However the word “green” may be a little misleading as some leaves in this type of salad may be red, white, or yellow, and anywhere in between is possible depending on the type of “green” used.
The hard part might be to find fresh crisp leaves that will shine as the salad core all year.
Easier in the warmer months when easy summer salads can be made because lettuce harvests are abundant all season. The grocers will have access to fresh local produce and the farmers markets will be bustling with their crops to sell.
Lettuce salad recipes with other greens added in for example kale, swiss chard, spinach, and the like, will in some areas be referred to as Garden Salads with the addition of vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers.
Enter The…
Mesclun Salad
Any combination of fresh young salad leaves with a handful of each comprised of watercress, arugula (rocket), parsley, dandelion leaves, sorrel, oak leaf lettuce, don’t leave out the garlic, and top with vinaigrette dressing for a delightful spring salad.
Simple Green Salad
A similar salad to the mesclun but does not necessarily have to be made of young salad greens. They can be more mature, but the list will be similar. I often include red and green types of lettuce varieties, swiss chard leaves, a little young kale (with salt to tenderize them), spinach, and red or green cabbage for a great summer salad.
🥕Vegetable Salads
🍅A Single Vegetable Starring In A Salad
Vegetable salads are what the name says, they focus primarily on fresh vegetables, either raw, cooked like the French Potato Salad must be before eating, or lightly roasted vegetables cooled can be a salad on their own or added to raw vegetables.
The famous French Dish Ratatouille is also a good stand-in as a cold salad.
And with the addition of herbs, cheese, or a vinaigrette dressing pairing nicely with each.
The spotlight for some is a single vegetable like my French Grated Carrot Salad, Refreshing Tomato Salad Recipe, and Cucumber Salad Recipe, which may sound plain but have nothing bland about them, they are tasty, with French herb mixes like Herbes de Provence and Fines Herbes accenting the star vegetables!
Most salads are served as a side and add far more than flavor, variation, and nutrition, they also add color as this Crunchy Red Cabbage Salad Recipe does.
🥗Vegetable Salad Medlies
Salad recipes can be a medley of fresh, crunchy assorted vegetables such as the classic Salade Niçoise With Homemade Dressing.
My Tasty Thai Spicy Beef Salad is another one like the Salade Niçoise that has a large selection of vegetables along with a protein, in this case, beef, to make it a good vegetable meal salad, and yes, it is not traditionally French, but mixing cuisines has its benefits too!
🥩Protein Salads Make Perfect Salad Dishes For Supper
Salads Made With Meats And Cheese
These are the protein types of salads that are made with meats, and cheese, like my Salade Auvergnate, which is like a ham salad recipe, or Bacon Salad Recipe For A Flavorful Twist.
In the bacon salad French bacon is called lardon, meat from the pork belly and now is cut with very little fat, not like our North American bacon, which has lots of fat.
When cooking with bacon, I always use back bacon or peameal bacon rather than strip bacon because of the lower fat content and meaty makeup.
🦐Fish And Seafood Salads
Then we have fish in the famous Salade Niçoise made with both tuna and spunky anchovies.
Salads made with especially shrimp, crab, and lobster are popular and tasty. Seafood salad is often made with pasta.
🌻Nuts And Seeds Add Protein
Nuts and seeds of most kinds add a different crunch than firm vegetables, enhancing a salad's allure.
They also add to the flavor profile of other items to enrich the overall enjoyment and increased nutrition is a big bonus.
Nuts as in Rotisserie Chicken Salad with Almonds Recipe will show how to make chicken salad special.
The almonds in this salad are a beautiful example of a nut building the flavors of the chicken, celery, and greens with a mouthwatering orange mayo dressing.
🥚Eggs Add Protein Too
Eggs, as in the iconic French Lyonnaise Salad are poached and can be added to many other salads like Bacon Salad (Frisee aux Lardons) and Salade Auvergnate and most green salads are delicious with a poached egg perched on top.
Hard-boiled eggs also add a tasty alternative and are traditionally added to salads like Salade Niçoise.
These protein foods are the star ingredients because they taste amazing, have so much variety, and are an important body-building element!
As I mentioned earlier it is easy to make any of these recipes for vegetarians by leaving out the meat and/or cheese.
🥜Legumes In Salads
Lentils, peas, and beans come in many varieties, are nutritious, go with so many other foods, are usually low cost to buy, and have a long shelf life before cooking.
- chickpeas, also called garbanzo beans
- green peas
- split-peas
- black-eyed peas
- peanuts, are a legume, not a nut
- black beans also called turtle beans
- cannellini beans, popular in Italy
- navy beans also called white beans
- kidney beans, red and white
- mung beans
- lima beans
- kidney beans
- adzuki beans
- red lentils
- green lentils
- brown lentils
As we travel around the world the list will grow larger. The variety is unfathomable and interchangeable in recipes in most cases.
Most legumes can be purchased in a can which is very fast and convenient when cooking with them or dried which is far more economical but does require time.
Here we are taking them off the shelf and making them into a French Lentil Salad where the lentils can easily be swapped out with beans.
For people following a plant-based diet, these types of salads are ideal.
🎨Visual Step-by-Step Guide
🔢Steps To Prepare A Salad
Getting the ingredients ready for the type of salad that is being made is necessary and important.
- All vegetables, greens, and grains will require washing to start.
- Some may need to have the skin removed by peeling.
- Careful drying ensures the food is not crushed or damaged in some way and that all unwanted moisture is removed so the vegetables do not become soggy.
- Then all ingredients need to be chopped, sliced, grated, or torn into the desired size for the outcome of the final dish.
- Eggs, meat, or fish may need to be cooked.
- Mix dressing or sauce created to compliment the individual salad being made.
- Pour dressing or sauce over salad.
🌿Herbs Are The Leafy Luster of Flavor
Herbs are the leaves of the plant. Their seeds fall into the spice category. But for practical use, I chop up the stalks of parsley and other herb stalks too as long as the stocks are not woody but moist and fragrant.
These beautiful leaves are added to dishes as fresh plants or dried.
Some popular herbs for salads are parsley (like many other herbs in itself offers different types), chives, basil (I have 3 types in my herb garden), thyme, rosemary, tarragon, dill, chervil, marjoram, fennel, oregano, bay leaf, mint, and more.
They add so many ways to flavor your salads by using them alone or mixing them with others to create a different taste.
Mix and match your favorites. Herb mixes are so fun and traditionally the French offer Herbes de Provence and Fines Herbes blends for salads and cooking.
Discover what herbs are blended to make these classic flavors of French cuisine through my French Herbs Capture The Flavor.
Do keep in mind that seasoning is a matter of personal taste. Some people may be horrified to hear me say this, but oregano is my least favorite flavor in the herb lineup.
It just doesn’t sit well with my taste buds, no matter how I use it or what I mix it with I don't care for the flavor. So please don’t feel pressured to like all herbs, it’s what you and the people you are cooking for like that is most important.
🧄The Alliums Line Up
A must in most vegetable, green, and protein salads is the allium family.
- onions
- garlic
- shallots
- leeks
- chives
- green onions
And each one has its variety to choose from.
I have included green onions because although not a separate vegetable from onions they are just young onions before the bulb ends forms, and have their own mild taste that beautifully adds to salads when raw and do not lose their sharpness when cooked.
🪄Salad Garnishes and Enhancements
What can added salad toppings do for all types of salad creations?
Add color, nutrition = health benefits, texture, interest, and don’t forget flavor!
These toppings support foods that are stars and important to the finished salads. Layered with a variety of colorful greens, grains, and/or vegetables make them the perfect choice to stand for a main meal.
By adding some toppings like:
- pickles
- olives
- nuts, whole or chopped
- seeds
- dried fruit
- fresh fruit
- shredded, crumbled, or finely chopped cheeses
- broken tortilla chips, pita chips, or potato chips
- crispy noodles
- roasted vegetables for added flavor
- hard-boiled egg
- herbs
- freshly made French Bread, baguette
- croutons, so many types of bread to make them from
- crackers
- crisps
- leftover meat
- seafood
- pomegranate arils (seeds)
- French fries
- chutney
- dips
With these garnishes your easy, delicious meal is complete!
🍾Types Of Dressings For Salads
We have covered a lot about the basis of a salad but what about the dressing sometimes called sauce or vinaigrette?
This part of a salad could be considered by some people the “pièce de résistance” (the best part of a salad or the triumph) for your salad!
It can make or break your mélange (blend).
It can add delight or be the opposite making the diner pucker up.
Too much is as ruinous as too little.
No one wants that! Oooh la la!
Experimenting is the only way to decide. Start with a little and then by adding a little more then tasting, until the perfect amount for each diner at your table is satisfied.
For your convenience and to get you started here are 13 recipes to pleasure the taste buds for you to try. It is a complete salad dressing guide on how to make salad dressings classified as vinaigrettes that you will love!
List Of French Salad Dressing Recipes
Make All 13 French Salad Dressing Recipes
For all types of salads and clear directions for how to make them.
- Basic Vinaigrette Dressing
- Creamy Vinaigrette
- Vinaigrette à la Moutarde
- Vinaigrette aux Fines Herbes
- Lemon & Olive Oil Vinaigrette
- A French Classic Dressing
- Red Onion & Shallot Vinaigrette
- Honey, Mustard Dressing
- Walnut Dressing
- Basil Dressing
- Creamy, Honey, Garlic Balsamic Vinaigrette
- Mint, Honey Vinaigrette Dressing
- Homemade Mayonnaise with 4 variations
then...
🫙Sensational Mayonnaise Dressing
Don’t forget the mayo!
Mayo has had a bad reputation, no fault of its own, but more because of the ingredients used, specifically the type of oil it is made with.
Way back when, at the dawn of healthy eating in the 1960s and 1970s, it was often put in the same class as white sugar and refined flour as “white death”.
A little severe at the least, as what one eats for sure may help to bring about an early demise, but there are many other factors to consider too.
The way to overcome mayo’s negative status as an undesirable food for good health is easy to do by using a healthy oil like olive oil, avocado oil, or any other healthy oil of your choice.
Changing the oil will also add variety to the taste of your mayo and give you a delicious selection of new dressings to use in the future.
If you don’t want the oil to flavor your mayo use a bland oil.
Easy Immersion Blender Mayonnaise Recipe
3 Bonuses With This Recipe
- Only 3 minutes to make.
- Only the hand blender to wash as it is made in the jar you store the mayo in.
- It is versatile because it can be added to many other dishes too!
It just doesn't get better than that!
4 Flavor Tastes
Or, maybe it does get better, I have a diversity of flavors for you to make with the basic mayo recipe!
This selection of tastes will help you rediscover the beauty of this wonderful dressing. Find them on the Easy Immersion Blender Mayonnaise Recipe page, see link given above!
- Mayonnaise Chantilly
- Tartar Sauce (Sauce Tartare)
- Sauce Niçoise
- Sauce Remoulade
🥗How To Toss A Salad
- Use your hands to prevent crushing the ingredients with a kitchen utensil, wash them thoroughly first!
- Mix the dressing right in the salad bowl and add the ingredients one by one mixing gently after each addition.
- Or, pour the dressing down the sides of the bowl with the ingredients in the bowl and toss gently.
- Using salad tongs to toss your salad will crush the delicate items, instead use salad servers which consist of a spoon and fork-like implements that can be used to mix the salad and serve it.
❄️Storage Tips
- Ideally, serving and consuming a salad soon after preparing is the best. Unless making a marinated salad, then it will be important for the ingredients to be mixed and let rest for a couple of hours mostly in the fridge.
- Store the wet ingredients (lettuce, tomato, onion) separately from the dry ingredients croutons, or buns in the fridge, and combine when ready. Good for 2 maybe 3 days depending on the items.
- Once vegetables are washed their shelf life is greatly reduced.
Top Tips For Salad Making
- Flavors will be enjoyed more if salad is eaten at near room temperature.
- Begin with good fresh, quality ingredients.
- Wash and dry ingredients well as a gritty salad is a big turn off and wet ingredients will result in a soggy salad.
- Always make your dressing, it is infinitely tastier, easier, faster, cheaper, and healthier.
📚Resources
Nutritional Considerations
- For years my go-to food health resource has been draxe.com.
Dr. Josh Axe, DC, DNM, CNS, is a doctor of chiropractic, certified doctor of natural medicine and clinical nutritionist with a passion to help people eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle. In 2008, he started a functional medicine center in Nashville, which grew to become one of the most renowned clinics in the world.
🛠Troubleshooting Tips
- Vegetables and greens that are a little limp can be refreshed by soaking in cold water for a few hours in the fridge. You may have to remove the outer leaves of lettuce but if you have never tried this before, you will be amazed at how effective it is.
- To prevent a watery salad, dry the ingredients well after washing.
- Watery salad can be remedied by letting it sit in the bowl for 10 minutes, then carefully lift the salad from the bowl with salad servers into another fresh clean bowl. Do not scoop down to the bottom of the bowl where the watery juice sits, leave this behind. If your salad requires more dressing add a little at a time now.
❔FAQ
1. Start with fresh, quality ingredients.
2. Don't put too much dressing on the salad making it soggy and too strong to enjoy.
3. Don't put too little on either as this will leave your diners wanting and not satisfied.
4. Attractive-looking salads will enhance your guests enjoyment.
5. Use a variety of flavors and textures.
Dressing is a matter of individual preference and the types of salad you make. These 2 factors will lead you to the right salad sauce because there is no one right salad dressing for everyone. After all, we are individuals. So go with a recipe recommendation then experiment.
Never taste your homemade dressing by itself, dip an ingredient in the dressing and give it a try. Try a couple of different items. (Never buy dressing, make your own!)
👩🏻🔬 Food Safety For All Types Of Salads
- Be careful when eating outside at a picnic or at home not to leave salads and dressing out in the heat longer than 45-60 minutes. Use a container that holds ice to keep food at a safe temperature.
- Handle meat and eggs carefully to prevent salmonella poisoning by cooking thoroughly and chilling properly.
- Mayonnaise should be kept cool.
If you tried this recipe please let us know.