Gordon Ramsay's Secret Hack For Preventing Soggy Salads
There are about a million different variations of what makes a salad. Certain salads feature a ton of moisture on purpose — recipes like coleslaw or potato salad are swimming in creamy mayonnaise-based dressing, for example. Other salads are served warm, containing cooked elements, like grains or roasted vegetables. However, for salads filled with plenty of raw vegetables and leafy greens, you typically want them to stay as fresh as possible. After all, no one wants the contents of their salad bowl to be unappetizingly limp or soggy.
Moisture is the enemy of fresh, crisp salads. That's precisely the reason that, even if you are preparing all the components of your salad in advance, most recipes advise that you do not dress the salad itself until the last minute, explains My Foodbook. How then do you keep all the ingredients at their desired texture? Luckily, chef and television personality Gordon Ramsay has a secret hack involving a particular vegetable that already features in many salads — fresh cucumbers. Cucumbers are a staple in salads, due to their texture and relatively mild taste. They also work with a huge variety of dressings, making them a versatile vegetable to incorporate.
They do, however, contain a lot of water. To be precise, they are actually about 95% water, according to Vegetable Facts. In order to avoid a soggy salad, you need to know how to properly prepare them.
Ramsay's go-to tip for cucumbers in salad
Don't worry. You do not need to eliminate cucumbers from your salads just to avoid them getting soggy. All you really need is to take one extra step: removing the seeds.
Gordon Ramsay shared his trick in action, as he cooked alongside his daughter for his YouTube channel. After peeling a cucumber, he proceeded to slice it lengthwise, creating two long halves and exposing the interior. From there, he simply took a teaspoon and scraped out all the seeds. As he explained, this step helps to eliminate the sogginess conundrum, as you're removing a good portion of the watery interior but leaving the firmer, crunchier outer portion.
You may even want to consider this simple tip for cucumber salads involving creamy dressing. Because cucumber salads are intended to have a softer texture, this may not be as big a concern. However, doing what you can to reduce the water content overall could help prevent your carefully-crafted dressing from being watered down too much.
Ramsay also added a useful tip related to assembly. To help keep the sogginess at bay in his prepared salad, he coated the bottom of his dish with dressing before layering protein, cucumbers, and lettuce on top. This, paired with the cucumber tip, should help yield the crispy salad of your dreams.