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A friend once told me that she buys a $12kale and avocado saladfor lunch every day because salad tastes better when it's prepared by someone else. I understand where she's coming from as I have a bad-for-my-wallet Sweetgreen habit. But, I believe that if you put your mind to it, you truly can make a salad in your own kitchen that's worthy of a place on a menu of overpriced lunch commodities. So, I put my mind to it. The first step? Acquiring the tools used by fast-casual restaurants to make salad—namely, a salad chopper.
Could a mere$8 chopperbe the difference between what comes from behind a lunch counter andmy own cutting board? I really hoped so. Think of the money I'd save!
To put my newly acquired salad chopper (apparently the official name is a mezzaluna chopper, FYI) to the test, I made three types of salads: a simple kale and avocado number with chopped almonds, a slightly more involvedromaine salad with feta and dill, and a good ol'taco salad. I made each of them twice—once using the chopper and once using my standard chef's knife.
A salad chopper is definitely not a time-saving, all-in-one chopping tool. The chopper can't just tear through, say, a whole cucumber or carrot. When making each of the salads with it, I still tore the lettuce and gave the vegetables a preliminary dice. It does make it possible to relax your knife skills: knowing that everything would soon be chopped even smaller, I didn't pay too much attention to how fine and uniformly I cut my produce.
The salad chopper does have the advantage of acting as a simultaneous mixer and fine-dicer. Once I'd prepped everything, I piled each salad's ingredients on the cutting board and went ham with a mezzaluna chopper, using it to simultaneously chop and toss the ingredients together.
When making all of the saladswithoutthe chopper, I had to be more attentive with my knife skills. I paid attention to how finely sliced each individual ingredient was, then I took the separate step to combine everything in a bowl with tongs (or in some cases, my hands).
In summary, from a convenience standpoint, the chopper has maybe a tiny advantage over a chef's knife, since it allows you to mix and chop simultaneously, but since you still have to pre-chop ingredients with a chef's knife, I'm not sure it offers a significant leg up.
So, when it came toflavordid using a chopper yield a more robust, satisfying salad than using a standardchef's knifeand tongs? It depends on what you're looking for. If your idea of a perfect salad involves total incorporation of ingredients so that they are so enmeshed that their individual parts are difficult to discern, the salad chopper might be for you. It chops individual ingredients into tiny components, melding them together and transforming them into something greater than the sum of its parts. Soft ingredients like cheese or avocado get mashed into the greens—which can have the positive effect of massaging tough greens like kale, and the negative effect of squashing and soggifying delicate greens like arugula.
If, however, your idea of a perfect salad involves being able to chew a distinct mouthful of each individual ingredient, you're better off using a chef's knife. Yes, you could use the mezzaluna chopper as you would a knife to finely chop each item on its own, thus preventing ingredients from getting mashed together, but if you want distinct ingredients like that, it's honestly more convenient to just use your standard chef's knife.
In my opinion, the ideal situation for a chopper is a taco salad, a dish whose value comes from combining basic ingredients—tomato, black beans, romaine (oriceberg!)生菜,切达干酪,鳄梨,玉米的筹码s, and maybes some olives—into one spectacular mess. Some of the inputs need a preliminary cut—dice the tomato with a knife,grate the cheese—but otherwise, you can just put everything on the cutting board (or in agiant bowl) and chop away with your mezzaluna until the tortilla chips turn to a crumb-like consistency and all of your ingredients are tossed, chopped and melded.
If I learned one thing from my salad bender, it's that a chopper is not the singular key to making a homemade salad taste like it's worth $15. To make a restaurant-worthy salad, you simply have to give the ingredients a little TLC when preparing them—and you can do that with a chef's knife and your tongs. A chopper does, however, make preparing salad a fun, somewhat theatrical affair—and if that's what it takes to get you toprepare your own lunch(or just eat your greens), then it's time you added one to your utensil drawer.
