Episode Details

“Touch everything when you’re at the market. It’s OK if you look weird sticking your nose in bunches of this or that. You’ll look like a pro to anybody who knows what they’re doing.” - Julia Sherman

Julia Sherman, artist, author, and creative force behind Salad for President, joins me to share her Five Rules for Making a Better Salad. We talk about finding joy in the process, cooking with all your senses, checking your ego, and finding fresh inspiration at the market. Julia also makes the case for giving dressing its due—and for making a salad you’re genuinely excited to eat.

I love salad, and I love that Julia is on a mission to help everyone make better ones. She sees a bowl of vegetables as a chance to play with color, crunch, flavor, and whatever looks good at the market. By the end of our conversation, I wanted to get into the kitchen and make my one reliable salad twelve different ways.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with chef, artist and author Julia Sherman, whose new dressing mixes salad for president is available everywhere.

She’s here to share her five rules to make a better salad. She talks about the importance of cooking with all of your senses, how to nurture your inner shopaholic, and that by using the freshest produce leads to the best results. It’s a fantastic conversation for anyone looking to up their salad game with tips from the master who makes every bowl beautiful.

Please take a moment to subscribe and rate this podcast. So let’s get into the rules here on HRN. Julia, always a pleasure when I get to see you, and I get to chat.

Loving Salad

I know you have a lot on your plate right now. Thank you for making the time.

Of course.

My favorite thing to do is to talk, so...

You literally wrote one of the books on salad. What do you love and what have you always loved about this type of dish?

I’ve loved salad since I was a little kid, which was strange then. My love of salad is layered.

I’m a passionate gardener. I’m fascinated by plants, produce. Salad to me is such a direct way to work with that material.

It’s really about honoring the ingredients. It’s about not doing too much to them, really building a dish around produce. One side of it is aesthetics.

It’s really about composition. It’s about color, what plate you use. The last thing was really that I used it as a foil to start conversations with artists.

I wanted to be setting myself up for a life where I was cooking with artists and facilitating conversation and how could I do that in a way that didn’t feel intimidating? Everybody has a salad that they make. Even the simplest salads are exceptional. I found that salad was a thing that I could use to get my foot in the door with artists by saying, would you make me a salad? When they would say that that was an unusual request and they were a little befuddled, I would be able to explain to them salad can be conceptual, a salad can be putting things together in a way that’s about contrast and juxtaposition.

Maybe it’s not even edible. It was this really open ended prompt that did loop back to the way that I prefer to eat, but was also a framework for a conversation. I feel like salads have been in the conversation so much these days.

Salad Trends

I rarely go out to eat or even have a meal or salad isn’t a big part of it. Why do you think salads are trending right now?

If I’m going to be idealistic, it’s because people are awakening themselves to the greater world of fruits and vegetables and that the monocultures that we’ve all been living in are depressing an