You Can Easily Adopt Olive Garden's Simple Salad Trick

Since you're keeping most of the ingredients raw, most salad tricks are quite simple, despite how effective they end up being. But Olive Garden takes both simplicity and effectiveness to the next level, chilling the bowls and plates they serve greens on before bringing them to customers.

If you've ever tried to cook spinach, you know just how fast a leafy green can wilt when exposed to even the lowest heat. Chilled bowls create fresher salads by keeping them at a temperature closer to a refrigerator's, ensuring their cell walls stay strong to deliver a satisfying crunch and a more refreshing taste. This can also help congeal the fats in dressing, helping it stick to the individual ingredients rather than pooling up at the bottom. Plus, it's a great idea if you want to keep food cold at cookouts or other outdoor venues where your cutlery and flatware can swiftly heat up.

This trick shouldn't take you much time, depending on the material of your bowl or plate. Metal cools quite quickly, but also warms up just as fast. Stoneware might take a little longer to chill than metal, but its great thermal conductivity means it sucks away heat from your salad while you eat, keeping it cool for longer. Still, refrigerating even a plastic bowl can't do anything but help. Just be sure your vessel is dry, so it doesn't crack in the freezer.

Keeping a salad cool and crisp isn't just about presentation and serving, but also preparation. Simple tricks, from ice baths to proper layering, can keep sogginess and warmth away from your food quite easily, but you have to do this before you take your first bite.

An ice bath is key to making crisper salads, especially when you work with older greens. As leafy vegetables age, they start to wilt from moisture loss. That moisture would have once plumped up the individual cells and created rigid structures that delivered a satisfying crunch, but evaporation and degradation have since ruined them. However, you can revive water-rich greens by plunging them in an ice bath for about 30 minutes, just enough time to rehydrate them without making them soggy.

Even if you've observed all the previously mentioned tricks, excess moisture from toppings can still leak in and ruin your salad, especially leftovers. Ingredients with a lot of juice, like cucumbers and tomatoes, may look amazing on top of your leaves, but they're essentially soaking your salad from the top down the whole time. While the presentation may not be as colorful, keeping these vegetables on the bottom of your plate or bowl is a much better method that reduces how wet your other ingredients get.