The Easy Trick For Preventing Soggy Premade Salad

If you commute to an office and prefer to eat something fresh for lunch, you can't go wrong with a homemade salad. (Plus, have you seen the price of popular takeout salads recently? Yikes!) But bringing along a salad has its risks. While transporting the salad itself is easy enough, hauling around a small tub of dressing comes with some clear drawbacks. The last thing you want is for the container to open up in your lunch bag.

We all know that pre-dressing salad makes it go soggy. However, one little trick can free you from the need to separately transport your dressing. It all comes down to the way you pile your salad into the container. Rather than putting the dressing on top, drizzle it on the bottom of your tub, then place the densest and hardest ingredients (like beans or chickpeas) in the base, stacking items up in the reverse order of weight so that the lightest things are at the top. Having the weightiest items on the bottom has multiple benefits. These ingredients won't soak up all the dressing while the salad sits and they also won't wilt or bruise the more delicate foods like the salad greens.

The shape of your salad container is also important. If you're going to carry a single-serving salad that you made ahead of time, dressing included, you're going to want a vessel that's taller than it is wide. That's why mason jars are so popular for this type of meal prep. A wider and shorter container means that all the ingredients, including leafy greens, can accidentally come into contact with the dressing, and delicate items might go mushy before you get a chance to eat them.

If the idea of dragging around a glass jar sounds risky, you can always opt to use multipurpose quart deli containers, which are tall and taper down toward the bottom. (I am going to note that they can crack if you squash them horizontally, so just be mindful of that.) If there's enough wiggle room in your container, you can give the whole thing a gentle shake to mix the dressing with the salad before you tuck in. This means you can eat straight out of the jar without having to dump the salad into a bowl. One less thing to clean up.