Welcome to The Move, a place for Eater’s editors to reveal their recommendations and pro dining tips — sometimes thoughtful, sometimes weird, but always someone’s go-to move.
The Move: Make (and eat) your salads upside down
One of my all-time favorite kids’ stories is Dr. Seuss’s 1984 classic The Butter Battle Book. In anapestic tetrameter, it tells of two neighboring communities — the Yooks and the Zooks — who are divided and eventually reach a full-blown nuclear standoff over one hot button issue: whether spreading your bread butter-side up or butter-side down is “the right, honest way.”
I have been living my life as a devoted butter-side-upper — or, in this case, a dressing-on-topper. I was brought up to believe that a proper salad is broadly composed of a pile of fresh ingredients topped with a smattering of wetter ingredients. Eventually the whole assortment gets jumbled and tossed, but my general rule of salad architecture has been, to start: ingredients below, saucy stuff above.
Recently, however, I’ve begun shaking up my dogmatic salad structure by moving the more viscous elements from up to down. And as it turns out, not only have a total of zero nuclear wars broken out, but my salads — and a lot of other dishes, actually — are, overall, fundamentally better. I think the Zooks were right.
The treason all started with too many tomatoes. I wanted to make a caprese salad to use up my late-summer glut, but I didn’t have any fresh basil or mozzarella. I did have a jar of pesto and a tub of ricotta in my fridge, but blobs of pesto and ricotta on top of a delicate salad felt, well, too blobby, too heavy, too — as one might say today — thicc. So I decided instead to try mixing the ricotta and pesto together and smearing it over the bottom of the salad plate, piling the fresh tomatoes on top, and achieving that same basily-cheese vibe that’s key to a good caprese — but somehow now better.