IntroductionIt All Starts with the DressingAt The Salad Project, the final step in ordering a salad is choosing what to dress it with. Nine times out of ten, however, it is the dressing that pulls you toward a salad in the first place. As much as I wish we did, we simply don’t crave chopped cucumber or baby spinach to the same extent that we crave the mouth-coating umami of a salty Caesar dressing, or the dribbleinducing acidity of a good apple cider vinaigrette. While it may be the last element we add to a salad (always at the last minute, please), a dressing has the power to turn an agglomeration of incohesive vegetables, proteins, and crunches into a dish with real personality and purpose.
Despite this, dressings are too often sidelined in salad recipes. This book puts dressings where they belong: in the spotlight.
When I design a salad, I always think about the dressing first, to satiate our customers’ cravings. I then select the ingredients that best pair with the dressing in question, considering the characteristics of those ingredients—texture, flavor, color, weight—to arrive at a salad that is well balanced, bold, and, of course, always fully dressed.
In this book, we bring you our favorite dressing recipes. Each dressing is paired with two salads alongside further suggestions for use, to show just how versatile these beautiful sauces can be for transforming simple ingredients into something delicious. We will give you multiple uses for your dressing in a week, allowing you to live by our principle of big flavor, fast.
Big Flavor, FastAt The Salad Project, we focus on ensuring busy customers joining us on their precious lunchbreaks are able to pick up their salads as quickly as possible. The priority is nourishing people with simple, creative, and curated food to fuel their busy lifestyles, without taking up their time.
Too often, dressings that go beyond a bit of honey, vinegar, and crusty mustard from the back of your fridge can feel overwhelming to prep—let alone shop for—after a long day. Did we finish that bottle of soy sauce? Is that jar of harissa still kicking about in the fridge?
This book encourages you to take the stress out of the day to day, leaving only the simple decisions for your midweek supermarket shop. Following our best practice will ensure that, regardless of those delirious decisions, you have what you need in the fridge to make a dinner that is always fully dressed and flavorful.
Quality Nutrients, Color + Concentrated Flavors As you should hopefully recognize by now, I believe dressings are pretty powerful.
Everybody loves the spicy green citrus of Mexican cooking, or the comforting combination of peanut and chile that emanates throughout Thai cuisine. But it’s not always that simple to bring those flavors into your cooking repertoire if you’re short on time or energy. Salad dressings allow you to capture and concentrate those flavors in one recipe that takes five minutes to prep at the start of your week. You can then pull them out of the fridge at any moment, turning neutral ingredients into something loaded with character.
But dressings go further than just providing punchy flavors. They can also serve as nutritional boosts to the meals they dress.
At The Salad Project, we don’t believe in restricting what you eat. Instead, we believe in fueling our bodies with as many good things as possible. We build as many layers of these good things into our salads as we can—and our dressings are a key contributor.
Historically, the purpose of salads has been to deliver as few calories as possible, while serving up a (hopefully) satisfying meal. We take a different view: the value of a salad actually lies in just how many different nutrients you can bring into one dish. Whether you subscribe to sourcing your “5-a-day,” or to packing in thirty plants per week, multilayered salads are your most effective route to success.
This book does not aim to prescribe a specific diet, but rather a lifestyle that celebrates fueling your body with quality nutrients, color, and creative flavors, all concentrated into simple prep methods that will fit in with even the busiest of schedules. But, because we know you’re probably interested, we’ve highlighted recipes that are particularly hard-hitters when it comes to protein, brain fuel, or gut happiness, so you can focus on a specific category if you feel inclined.
Copyright © 2026 by Clem Haxby. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
