A friend once told me that she buys a $12 kale and avocado salad for lunch every day because salad tastes better when it's prepared by someone else. I understand where she's coming from as I have a bad-for-my-wallet Sweetgreen habit. But, I believe that if you put your mind to it, you truly can make a salad in your own kitchen that's worthy of a place on a menu of overpriced lunch commodities. So, I put my mind to it. The first step? Acquiring the tools used by fast-casual restaurants to make salad—namely, a salad chopper.
Could a mere $8 chopper be the difference between what comes from behind a lunch counter and my own cutting board? I really hoped so. Think of the money I'd save!
To put my newly acquired salad chopper (apparently the official name is a mezzaluna chopper, FYI) to the test, I made three types of salads: a simple kale and avocado number with chopped almonds, a slightly more involved romaine salad with feta and dill, and a good ol' taco salad. I made each of them twice—once using the chopper and once using my standard chef's knife.
A salad chopper is definitely not a time-saving, all-in-one chopping tool. The chopper can't just tear through, say, a whole cucumber or carrot. When making each of the salads with it, I still tore the lettuce and gave the vegetables a preliminary dice. It does make it possible to relax your knife skills: knowing that everything would soon be chopped even smaller, I didn't pay too much attention to how fine and uniformly I cut my produce.
The salad chopper does have the advantage of acting as a simultaneous mixer and fine-dicer. Once I'd prepped everything, I piled each salad's ingredients on the cutting board and went ham with a mezzaluna chopper, using it to simultaneously chop and toss the ingredients together.
When making all of the salads without the chopper, I had to be more attentive with my knife skills. I paid attention to how finely sliced each individual ingredient was, then I took the separate step to combine everything in a bowl with tongs (or in some cases, my hands).
In summary, from a convenience standpoint, the chopper has maybe a tiny advantage over a chef's knife, since it allows you to mix and chop simultaneously, but since you still have to pre-chop ingredients with a chef's knife, I'm not sure it offers a significant leg up.
Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Food Styling by Anna Billingskog
