The Ultimate Way To Cut Vegetables For A More Balanced Salad

Salads are the ultimate weekday lunch or a quick and healthy dinner option, and depending on your preferred flavors, you can make them any way you want. They most often start with some kind of leafy green base, whether it's robust kale leaves, delicate butter lettuce, or even slept-on oakleaf lettuce. Then comes the best part: adding your favorite salad toppings. But before you chop those veggies into crunchy bites, try prepping them a different way for a more balanced forkful: shave them instead.

Those leafy greens are ultra thin. When you pile a bunch of chopped veggies on top, the balance of each flavor gets thrown off. You can't fit as many chopped veggies on your fork either, which means each bite has as slightly different flavor. Even if you can't shave a vegetable, you can slice it to better-match the shaved texture; this works especially well with juicy tomatoes, for instance. Stick with vegetables that pair well together, and you'll be surprised at how much more you enjoy the overall mouthfeel of a shaved salad, too.

Some vegetables have different textures than others, so keep this in mind when choosing which veggies to add to your shaved salad. Brussels sprouts and cabbage are great here, as well as carrots and celery. You can even add fruits like apples which can be easily shaved, but you might want to peel them first so that no solo skin pieces end up in your salad.

If you have a mandoline, you'll want to use it for the easiest way to shave the ingredients, but you don't need to go buy one. A vegetable peeler will work just fine for a number of veggies, and if you're looking for uses for that cheese grater, shaving veggies is a good one. Most large cheese graters have a variety of serrated options, so you can choose how you want to shave the veggies. Some even have a planer, which is a sharp edge designed similarly to a vegetable peeler. If you're careful, you can use a knife, but only do so with an extremely sharp one so it gets an even, effortless slice. Dress and toss your salad (consider using your hands instead of tongs to do so), and it will be good to go!