It's Best To Chill The Plates When Serving Fresh Salad

Fresh or warm, there's no singular way to make a salad. However, we can all agree that they should each be served at their intended temperatures, because there's nothing worse than picking at a warm and wilted garden salad that should have been bursting with vibrant flavors and firm textures. Although keeping ingredients cool is half the battle in keeping fresh salads crisp, the other key aspect is to chill the dinnerware.

Salads often require quite a bit of prep work. Between washing and chopping ingredients, whisking together a dressing, and finally combining everything together, serving tends to take a backseat. But the reality is that it's an equally important part of the process. In fact, how a salad is served can be what differentiates an okay-tasting salad from an incredibly delicious one. Evidently, if you're aiming for the latter, then chilling plates is the way to go.

While you might already be familiar with heating dishware to keep sides like a sautéed chard salad piping hot, plates can also be cooled in an effort to keep fresh salads — think leafy greens, crunchy slaws, and creamy tuna salads — at their prime. Serving these sorts of salads on a plate or in bowl that's been previously chilled, delays greens from prematurely deteriorating, allowing produce to stay perfectly crisp and ultra cool.

Chilling plates and bowls isn't particularly complicated, nor is it terribly time-consuming, which means there's literally no excuse why you shouldn't be doing it every time you serve a salad. All you need to do is store a stack of clean and dry dishware in the fridge for about 15 minutes. You can also stick them in the freezer for a quick fix, should you be especially short on time, but still want to reap the benefits of a cold salad plate.

Despite that dishware can be kept chilled until ready to be used, should you notice that the plates are becoming overly frosty, pull them from the fridge or freezer. Wait a few minutes before using them to serve salad, as this will allow them to warm up slightly, reducing the risk of freezing delicate lettuce leaves and any dressing.

Last but not least, if you really want to go a step further, why not chill the salad forks, as well? To really ensure each forkful is just as refreshing as the next, cooling down cutlery can be an exceptionally great hack to keep no-cook meals at their freshest during the dog days of summer. Give things a chill and you'll never go back to serving fresh salads on room-temperature dinnerware again!