A salad is the one thing almost nobody writes down. You throw it together, it comes out watery, or drowned, or somehow both, and there is no recipe to blame. So I built the thing I wanted: tell it what sort of salad you are making and it works out the whole lot, with real weights, a dressing that belongs with it, a method and a shopping list.
I put a salad bar out at work every day with my team, and doing it daily teaches you things no recipe mentions: how much of anything to actually make, which combinations get eaten and which sit there untouched, and what has turned watery by the time people reach it.
The figures in the builder come from measuring published recipes rather than from a rule of thumb, and where one is mine rather than sourced it says so. It scales from one person to twenty. It works in metric or US.
Build Your Salad, Step by Step
What sort of salad is it?
This is the one choice that changes everything else. A slaw and a grain salad are built to different ratios, not the same salad with different bits in.
Is it a side or the whole meal?
Worth asking separately, because it moves the protein and the base rather than just the serving size.
What is it built on?
Tap any of them to read what it brings.
Any protein?
The amount follows from whether this is a side or the meal, so you get a portion rather than "add some chicken".
Which direction should it go in?
This seeds the vegetables and decides which dressings you are offered, so the salad hangs together instead of being a pile of things.
What goes in it?
Already set to what suits the direction you picked. Change any of it. Adding more makes each one smaller rather than making the bowl bigger.
Anything for texture?
Optional. A salad with none is not wrong, but this is the cheapest way to make one more interesting to eat.
Which dressing?
Only the ones that belong with the direction you chose. Each is a real published formula with its own ratio, not one house rule applied to everything.
How many are you feeding?
How much dressing a salad actually needs
Drowning it is the commonest way a good salad is spoiled, and the reason is that people use one dressing habit for every kind of salad. They are not the same. Measured across the recipes I worked from, a leafy side salad wants around 15 ml a head. A potato salad wants more than twice that, closer to 34 ml, because potato is dense and absorbs rather than coats. A grain salad wants the least of the lot, about 11 ml, since the grain is already carrying moisture of its own.
The spread inside each of those is wide, so treat the number as a sensible place to start rather than a law. The builder gives you the amount for the salad you are actually making, and the method tells you to hold a little back and taste, which is the part that matters more than any figure.
Why the amounts change with the kind of salad
Leaves are quoted by weight, and a portion is smaller than most people expect at roughly 25 g a head for a side. Grains and pasta are quoted dry, because that is how you buy them and how you cook them, and the builder handles the difference between dry and cooked where a source supports it. Potato is quoted raw. A main-course salad is not simply a bigger side salad either: the base grows as well as the protein, so it eats like a meal rather than like a garnish with chicken on top.
Herbs get a weight too, which nearly nothing else does. Most recipes tell you to add a handful of parsley and leave you to guess, and a handful is not a quantity you can shop for. For the small amounts it gives you spoons rather than grams, because nobody weighs 5 g of mint.
FAQ for the Salad Builder
Will it make me a Niçoise, or a Caprese?
No, and it will not pretend to. Those are specific dishes with specific rules, and half of what makes them what they are is preparation rather than ingredients: bread soaked and squeezed, cucumber salted and drained, potatoes dressed while they are still warm. The builder composes a salad from your choices and gives it a plain descriptive name, so it never claims a classic it has not earned. Named classics may come later, built properly, as their own thing.
Where do the quantities come from?
From measuring published recipes and taking the middle of what they do, rather than from one source or from instinct. Each figure records what it measures, how many recipes it came from, and whether it is dry or cooked or raw, because a grain weight that stops saying which is worse than no weight at all. A few figures are mine rather than sourced, and those are marked as house decisions inside the tool rather than dressed up as research.
How many can it cook for?
One to twenty. Everything scales, including the dressing and the herbs, and the amounts round to something you can actually weigh rather than to three decimal places.
Why are some directions missing?
Because I will not invent a cuisine. A direction only goes in when there is a named dish behind it that I can point at: Greek comes from horiatiki, Japanese from cucumber sunomono, Polish from mizeria. Korean is not there because I looked and could not find an anchor I was happy with, and I would rather leave a gap than fill it from imagination.
Can I share the salad I built?
Yes. The share link carries your whole build, not just the page, so whoever opens it lands on your exact salad and can change anything they like from there. You can give it a name of your own first, and the name travels with it.
Do I have to use the dressing it offers?
Each direction offers the dressings that belong with it rather than the whole list, which is the point of choosing a direction at all. Every one is a real formula with its own ratio, so a sharper vinaigrette and a tahini dressing are not the same thing with a different label. Some carry no oil whatsoever, which is normal for the style and not an omission.