Pressed Salad

Apparently, the new craze in salad these days is pressed salad. I hadn’t ever had one before making this one, so it was kind of an experiment. I’ve only been hearing about them for the past month or so. From what I understand, it’s sort of similar to the process of making sauerkraut, so it has a lot of the same health benefits, even though it only has about an hour to ferment.

I used to make sauerkraut before I worked so much. I heard from someone who stayed at the hippocrates institute to combat cancer that they serve sauerkraut with every meal. Once I found that out, I started making it, because cabbage is cheap, but raw sauerkraut is usually quite pricey. If you google the reasons why sauerkraut is good for you to eat regularly, you’ll find more reasons than you’ll be able to read in a day. They range from digestive aids to glowing skin to natural antibiotics to increased enzyme count to diminishing the craving for sweets and on and on and on.

Most pressed salad advocates talk about how they’re easier to digest than regular salad, but that could be said for the chopped salad as well. Remember the last salad fad? The New York restaurants chopped up the salad ingredients so tiny that you didn’t even really know what was in your salad. The upside, though, is that it would decrease the amount of work your body has to do with chewing and digesting.

So, I guess the real question is, when you’re pressing salad for only an hour, is that even enough time for your salad to grow any probiotics? Some sources say you can get probiotics from only 10-15 minutes of pressing your salad. What do you all think?

All you have to do to make this is chop up your salad ingredients, massage them with salt (like you do when you make kale salad), and press into a glass or ceramic vessel (traditionally sauerkraut is made in a crock, but you can use anything in your kitchen really). Top with another glass or ceramic dish and then top with something really heavy to push all the air out. I used some little heart ceramic dishes I got from Daiso for only $1.50 each.

Once you have your pressed salad, you just top with your favorite dressing. I used lemon juice only, but I think next time I’ll use gomasio and nutritional yeast as well. I also like this yummy healthy ranch dressing recipe.