While a simple garden or wedge salad is a refreshing and healthy side dish or starter, health enthusiasts, foodies, and chefs have all capitalized on the infinite potential salads have to become the centerpiece. Main course salads are increasingly popular, encompassing a wide variety of raw and cooked vegetables, proteins, and grains for a flavorful, hearty, and texturally exciting meal. However, more elaborate salads require more prep work, different cooking methods, and more dishes.
Sheet pan salads are an efficient and delicious way to use fewer dishes while still creating a complex and filling combination of cooked and raw veggies. Sheet pan dinners are a well-known concept that saves you multiple roasting pans and bowls by seasoning and oiling proteins and veggies directly on the oven pan. Sheet pan salads are essentially sheet pan meals with extra garnishes. The only dishes you’ll dirty are the sheet pan and the knife and cutting board you use to prep the ingredients.
As the sheet pan ingredients roast, you’ll have plenty of time to chop up raw ingredients and prepare a fresh salad dressing. Once out of the oven, you can assemble the raw ingredients over the cooked ingredients and finish with a drizzle of dressing, effectively converting the sheet pan into a serving dish. Plus, a shallow serving dish makes for a more colorful and revealing presentation; the chef has more control over the distribution of ingredients, thereby giving the diner a complete preview of all the fix-ins.
Ideas and tips for sheet pan salads
Sheet pan salads will surely become a go-to method for efficient and elegant meals, but they require some strategizing. The prime factor to consider when making a sheet pan salad is the cooking times of each ingredient you plan on roasting. Another factor is the order of preparation for maximum efficiency; you’ll prepare the cooked ingredients while the oven preheats and the raw ingredients while the others are roasting.
The strategic part of the sheet pan salad is staggering the order you add each ingredient to the baking sheet so that everything is cooked and crisped evenly. Root vegetables tend to take longer than cruciferous vegetables, but you could balance their cooking times by cutting heartier vegetables into much smaller pieces. That said, it is simple enough to set a timer for every ingredient you’ll add to the sheet. To ensure that the oven temperature doesn’t drop, take the sheet pan out of the oven to sprinkle raw ingredients in with the partially cooked ones, drizzling them with oil before quickly shoving them back in.
Sheet pan salads cater to any combination of ingredients you have in mind. You can draw inspiration from Look’s extensive list of salad recipes like maple-roasted carrot salad with Marcona almonds and goat cheese or a roasted butternut squash salad. You could also add roasted elements to classic salad recipes, like a sheet pan Caesar salad with kale, croutons, and roasted chickpeas.
