Sautéed salad? Yep, sautéed salad.
This grew out of my aversion to leftover salad. Once the greens, particularly delicate greens, are dressed, I just can’t deal with how soggy and limp they are the next day. The salad is unappealing, and given how greens are an uncooked food that’s occasionally implicated in outbreaks, I’d just rather not eat something that’s already spent a fair amount of time out of the fridge and somewhere south of human mouths and noses. This gets extra tricky when it comes to batting cleanup at events with large pans of unfinished salad about to be tipped into the trash. I want to rescue the salad! But, uhhh, it’s been sitting out for a bit and all those people had been passing by it and breathing on it.
My unhinged solution? Salad a la stovetop!
It’s as simple as dumping the leftover salad into a sauté pan and subjecting it to some heat. The dressing serves as a cooking oil and voila!
Now, I will say that this rarely yields a culinary masterpiece. And cooking alone doesn’t eliminate every marginal increase in risk from a salad’s stint on a buffet, but for me it’s good enough. The cooked greens can be more bitter and they get tougher and require more chewing, at least as far as I’ve found. But for a quick lunch on a work day, I’m totally fine with this. I wasn’t going to be eating a gourmet meal anyway.
And, if you want to try a more culinarily informed approach, I recommend checking out Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking (affiliate link). In it, sisters Margaret Li and Irene Li note: “A stir-fry can be just leafy greens like mild lettuce or hearty kale; it’s a great way to use up lots of wilted leaves, as a daunting pile of fresh greens will rapidly shrink to a manageable size in the pan.” They also suggest dropping greens needing using up in their “Anything-in-the-Kitchen Pasta,” or chopping and stirring lettuce into a stew or soup right before serving. To be fair, they’re talking about simple greens, not salads, but I’d argue they’re similar enough.
In my world, leftover salad often comes up at the end of events at our synagogue where it was likely served alongside hummus and baba ghanoush. In this case, I heat up the dips in the microwave and thin them with some water and add some nutritional yeast to add protein and more nutrition. Then I layer the dip mixture on bread and top it with the sautéed salad. Weird? Yes! Good? Also, yes!
Quick aside: How to avoid wilted greens in salad
I am generally averse to leftover salads of delicate greens, even if things are still in relatively good shape, but you can slow a salad’s demise. Using an emulsified dressing will absolutely help. Somewhat counter intuitively, it’s the oil in a dressing that speeds along wilting. As J. Kenji Lopez-Alt points out over at Serious Eats, leaves all have a natural, water-resistant coating. That coating causes vinegar to roll off like raindrops, but is made up of oil-soluble stuff. So the oil creeps into the leaves and they wilt. An emulsified dressing locks up some of the oil, reducing its contact with the leaves.
But we’re here today to talk about sautéing salad and here’s my “recipe.”
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Salad Sauté
Description
How to revive leftover salad
Ingredients
- Leftover salad.
- A little oil (or extra dressing) if the salad isn’t sufficiently dressed.
Anything else you want to use up that would pair nicely with the salad.
Instructions
- Sauté the salad!
- Add in anything else you’d like to use up, if you think it will go nicely. You could also mix the finished sauté into something else for extra veggie content.
- Build a meal in whatever way makes sense for you. That could mean putting the sautéed salad on a sandwich, in a pasta, over rice, in soup, alongside eggs.
