How To Properly Dress A Salad When Meal-Prepping

Meal-prepping is a time-saving and cost-effective way to ensure a good homemade meal every day of the week. The principle is simple: Make a big batch of your chosen meals and divide them into dishes so you have a ready-to-go homemade meal for each day of the coming week. However, keeping your meals fresh as the week goes on requires strategic planning and storage.

Meal-prep salads are a primary example of why strategy is important. You can easily distribute all your salad ingredients among a week's worth of jars. However, imagine reaching the end of the week and grabbing a salad that has been sitting in dressing for days. You undoubtedly would have to deal with a soggy mess. Pre-dressing salads is one of many common mistakes in meal-prep. Luckily, there is a simple method that can help keep your salad servings fresh throughout the week. Simply spoon your dressing into the bottom of each container and layer the salad on top.

Pouring some salad dressing into the bottom of a jar is an easy way to keep it separate from the rest of the salad and keep your mealtime preparations to a minimum. When it comes time to eat, you simply shake the container to distribute the dressing while mixing the rest of the salad ingredients. One TikTok creator demonstrated the simple genius of this meal-prep method.

@khadiabt

Key tip is to keep all the dressing at the bottom of the jar 🥗🫙 #saladjar #saladbowl #saladmealprep #mealprep

♬ Strangers – Kenya Grace

The creator shrewdly layers the ingredients, keeping the lettuce — the ingredient most prone to sogginess — from touching the dressing on the bottom. When it comes time to serve the salad, they simply shake it up and dump it onto a plate. If you are taking your salad on the go or want to keep your dirty dishes to a minimum, you can easily shake it up and eat it out of the container instead.

It is easiest to keep dressing separate from lettuce in a jar, as square or rectangular containers tend to have a larger base surface area. If you do not have jars, though, you can still keep your dressing separate by pre-portioning it into little cups that you can store with the containers. Alternatively, you can stick to salads with ingredients that are not as prone to sogginess as romaine or other leafy greens. Some will say cowboy caviar is the solution to boring meal-prep for this reason. Not only is this Tex-Mex dish delicious, but it also contains ingredients that hold up well throughout the week, even if you dress those ingredients ahead of time.

Meal-prepping salads is an easy way to incorporate plenty nutritious foods into your day. You can even go the extra mile in the DIY lane by making your flavorful salad dressing from scratch. However you choose to make your salad, be sure that your preparation strategy guarantees a good result.