Julia Sherman's Five Rules for Making a Better Salad

“Touch everything when you’re at the market. It’s OK if you look weird sticking your nose in bunches of this or that. You’ll look like a pro to anybody who knows what they’re doing.” - Julia Sherman

Julia Sherman, artist, author, and creative force behind Salad for President, joins me to share her Five Rules for Making a Better Salad. We talk about finding joy in the process, cooking with all your senses, checking your ego, and finding fresh inspiration at the market. Julia also makes the case for giving dressing its due—and for making a salad you’re genuinely excited to eat.

I love salad, and I love that Julia is on a mission to help everyone make better ones. She sees a bowl of vegetables as a chance to play with color, crunch, flavor, and whatever looks good at the market. By the end of our conversation, I wanted to get into the kitchen and make my one reliable salad twelve different ways.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with chef, artist and author Julia Sherman, whose new dressing mixes salad for president is available everywhere.

She’s here to share her five rules to make a better salad. She talks about the importance of cooking with all of your senses, how to nurture your inner shopaholic, and that by using the freshest produce leads to the best results. It’s a fantastic conversation for anyone looking to up their salad game with tips from the master who makes every bowl beautiful.

Please take a moment to subscribe and rate this podcast. So let’s get into the rules here on HRN. Julia, always a pleasure when I get to see you, and I get to chat.

Loving Salad

I know you have a lot on your plate right now. Thank you for making the time.

Of course.

My favorite thing to do is to talk, so...

You literally wrote one of the books on salad. What do you love and what have you always loved about this type of dish?

I’ve loved salad since I was a little kid, which was strange then. My love of salad is layered.

I’m a passionate gardener. I’m fascinated by plants, produce. Salad to me is such a direct way to work with that material.

It’s really about honoring the ingredients. It’s about not doing too much to them, really building a dish around produce. One side of it is aesthetics.

It’s really about composition. It’s about color, what plate you use. The last thing was really that I used it as a foil to start conversations with artists.

I wanted to be setting myself up for a life where I was cooking with artists and facilitating conversation and how could I do that in a way that didn’t feel intimidating? Everybody has a salad that they make. Even the simplest salads are exceptional. I found that salad was a thing that I could use to get my foot in the door with artists by saying, would you make me a salad? When they would say that that was an unusual request and they were a little befuddled, I would be able to explain to them salad can be conceptual, a salad can be putting things together in a way that’s about contrast and juxtaposition.

Maybe it’s not even edible. It was this really open ended prompt that did loop back to the way that I prefer to eat, but was also a framework for a conversation. I feel like salads have been in the conversation so much these days.

Salad Trends

I rarely go out to eat or even have a meal or salad isn’t a big part of it. Why do you think salads are trending right now?

If I’m going to be idealistic, it’s because people are awakening themselves to the greater world of fruits and vegetables and that the monocultures that we’ve all been living in are depressing and uninspiring as more and more people shop the farmer’s market and even what you see the farmers are offering has changed so much. It’s sort of a status symbol to know your fruits and veggies to start to have more of a specific grasp on what the full spectrum is that’s out there.

Salad for President, Dressing For You

You’ve been such a good guide and teacher, both in your cookbooks, through your social video content. And now you’ve gone as far as creating your own line of instant dressings, also titled Salad for President. What inspired you to bring the flavors you love directly into people’s kitchens?

Over time, I’ve been making salads under the moniker Salad for President for over 10 years now.

The amount of times that I’ve heard people complain about making dressing, it’s a pain point.

Sure.

One of the things I love about cooking is that you don’t need a lot of pre-made stuff.

But I do think that if the grand ambition is to get people to eat more salad, eat healthier and cook at home, if there are parts of that process that are daunting that somebody just hates doing and I can help with that, then that felt really exciting.

I love it.

Dressing needs to be fun and dressing can give your entire meal a personality.

Most people, when they’re making dinner, throw together the salad at the end, everything’s hot and it’s on the table and they’re like, shit, I don’t have a dressing. It’s an afterthought. The dressings, just to explain the format, is they’re powdered.

It’s a play or an update on an old fashioned form factor. The idea is that you make your dressing fresh every time you make it with fresh lemon juice and some olive oil, the powder, and you shake it up. It emulsifies.

I just really want people to cook. I don’t understand why people eat every day. When people tell me they don’t cook, I want a diary of what do you eat every day? It blows my mind.

If people could find a little bit of joy in the process of cooking and felt good about their vegetables, it would make a huge difference. If you have something that you can follow to a T and it’s foolproof and you make that 10 times and then maybe you start to get the confidence to play with it, add a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Suddenly you got a little bit of salad pride.

I love how passionate you are about salad and it can be very, very infectious. The fact that you’ve really mastered not just one, but many salads makes me so excited for you to share your five rules to make a better salad. And I think before I felt comfortable with making what I consider my one and only salad, which I feel very dialed in about just one, just one, but part of it is that I look forward to making it and the steps that go into it, which makes it be rule number one.

Rule 1: Love the Process

All right.

Rule number one is love the process.

Yes.

As I get older, I’m more and more confident in my identity as a process oriented person.

It’s great.

I love making things.

If you don’t enjoy the process, it’s really, really hard to end up with a good result when you’re cooking. And I feel like I just had the best education in this, in opening a restaurant and watching people in the kitchen making my recipes, which were written down to the gram for every single ingredient, and then watching somebody make it who doesn’t really care, doesn’t have a connection to it, is crazy. It’s such a cheesy trope.

Love is an important ingredient, but you have to feel it. When I was drawn to salad originally as a platform, it’s one of the things that a lot of people have one recipe that they’re like, I got this nailed.

Yeah.

And if that’s the thing you love, lean into it, iterate on it, make it 12 different ways. Figure out what you actually enjoy making and then explore that. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Classic salads are classic for a reason. They’re fucking awesome. One of the things that I’ve come to realize about salad, even the most simplest ones are complicated, which can be intimidating, but if you cook with all of these, it’ll help you make a better salad.

Rule 2: Cook With All Your Senses

What’s your rule number two?

Rule number two is to cook with all your senses. When I’m home by myself, I will do what every normal person does. I eat my dinner out of a mixing bowl and it does not taste good.

You put that same thing on a plate and you treat it nice. It’s going to taste a lot better. The thing that I love about salad is that it is all about all your senses.

You’ve got color, which is huge. You’re making a potato salad. Why do just white potatoes if it’s going to be all white with the dressing? Add some purple potatoes, add some pink potatoes.

Think about color. Texture is really a much overlooked component. I worked at Chopped for five years, a creative director, and did a lot of work on their culinary team.

I learned so much about the importance of crunch. We think about this with our snack food. The crunch is addictive.

In a salad, it really drives the next bite. Smell. Don’t just think about what you think might taste good together, but think about two things that smell good together.

Touch everything when you’re at the market. It’s OK if you look weird sticking your nose in bunches of this or that. You’ll look like a pro to anybody who knows what they’re doing.

A good salad never fails to impress. I can understand that when people get in the kitchen and they want to serve something, especially if they’re going really big with a protein, they want the salad to match that level. That being said, there is nothing wrong with making a well-known, well-loved salad if you check this.

Rule 3: Check Your Ego

What’s your rule number three?

Check your ego. This is something I really tried to keep in the forefront of my mind when I was working on the restaurant menu. Cookbooks, too.

Yes.

When writing cookbooks, there’s a point, if you’ve worked on it for too long, where you start to just get weird.

Yes.

To get back to the things that actually taste good. No one wants to eat your ego. And you feel that when you go to restaurants.

You can feel when the person’s just up in their head, not connected to what people actually want to eat. For me, with a background as an artist, I can always make that one-to-one connection to the art that I love is always seemingly stupidly simple. So when a salad’s just too try-hard or too eager to impress, it doesn’t land.

I could eat a Greek salad for the rest of my life and I could make 100 versions of a Greek salad. And I can think about how I treat each of those ingredients.

Yes.

It’s OK to just make something that’s good. You don’t have to have authored every inch of it. If you want to counter just going for the simplistic approach, you can embrace going crazy at the market and raiding your pantry, which makes up your rule number four.

Rule 4: Tap Into Your Inner Shopaholic

Tap into your inner shopaholic.

Salad fatigue is real.

Yeah.

When people eat the same salad every day, they lose their joy. In L.A., I spend a lot of time going to all the different markets. The farmer’s market for my produce, that’s just one piece of the puzzle.

The Thai market, the Indian markets are just a library of crunchy things. It’s so great.

All the things that go into chaat, the crispy fried mung beans.

All of those things are just salad gold. Don’t feel bad about spending money on really good produce. That’s one thing that I have absolved myself of.

Still cheaper than eating out. It’s still really good for you. Think about the produce.

It is the most important piece. But then you can have an arsenal of texture, crunch and flavor that’s coming from so many other directions. It pays to go fresh every time with the produce and what’s making up the main elements of your salad.

The other element that people really get stuck on is the dressing. Your fifth and final rule talks about a way that you can help people get around a dressing debacle.

Rule 5: There’s No Shade in Lemon and Olive Oil

What’s your rule number five?

There’s no shade in lemon and olive oil, especially if you’re using good olive oil.

No.

There’s no shade in vinegar and olive oil. And there’s so many fun vinegars out there to play with.

If you’ve been using balsamic all your life, which I love, you should take a walk down your specialty food market. The vinegar and oil section. Really look at the Banuel’s vinegar, sherry vinegars.

They all have different acidities and it’s really fun to taste and figure that out.

Yes.

With the salad dressing mixes that we just launched.

This is a push for those of you who are two ingredient dressing people, but aspire to be more. Our little powdered packets, they’re made of powdered miso, powdered Worcestershire sauce, powdered soy sauce, powdered mushroom. All you have to do is add lemon and olive oil.

But also you can mix it up. Try rice wine vinegar instead. Try sesame oil.

It’s not cheating. It’s OK to get a boost. We’re busy.

We’re busy. I make salad all day so that you don’t have to worry about it.

I love that.

Julia, congratulations on everything. If people want to get the salad dressing packets, if people want to get the books, if people just want to see what you’re making, where can they go?

Always go to my two Instagram accounts now for dressing content. It’s at Salad for President.

And my personal account, which is a lot of cooking videos, is at Julia Sherman for President. And then if you want to buy the dressings, you can buy them on SaladforPresident.com.

I’m looking forward to trying them. I’m finally home.

I can get back into the kitchen during the summer salad season here in L.A. And I hope to see you around a salad bowl very soon.

Thank you, Darin.

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