Salads

Macaroni salad is a staple of barbecues and picnics, and it’s often made carelessly, with overcooked pasta swimming in a heavy, bland dressing. The difference …

Couscous salad goes wrong most often at the very first step, with grains that end up clumped and stodgy rather than light and fluffy, usually …

Lobster is expensive enough that the worst thing you can do is bury it under a heavy, overpowering dressing, which is exactly what a lot …

Fruit salad is often treated as an afterthought, just a bowl of chopped fruit thrown together with no real thought given to how the pieces …

Chickpea salad tends to get treated as an afterthought, something thrown together with whatever’s in the cupboard rather than a dish worth putting real thought …

A rocket salad has so few ingredients that the dressing has to be exactly right, since there’s nowhere else for flavour to come from. Too …

Boiled beetroot loses a surprising amount of its natural sweetness into the cooking water, which is part of why so many beetroot salads taste flat …

Caprese salad only has four main ingredients, which means there’s no room for a weak one. Ripe tomatoes, good mozzarella, fresh basil and decent olive …

This Gordon Ramsay broccoli salad recipe keeps the broccoli genuinely crisp rather than soft and grey, which is where most broccoli salads go wrong. A …