32 Salads That Shed Their Leaves to Make Room for the Good Stuff

Raise your hand if you've been left with a wooden bowl full of soppy leaves, all the good bits of the salad—the cheese cubes, the toasted nuts, the roasted veg—excavated long ago by the smart, selective dinner guests. Now raise your hand if the same is the case on your personal plate.

Well, whoops. Why'd you buy (and wash, and dry) those leaves in the first place?

There's a time for bowls of green, yes—but the time's not high summer, when you want raw something but you know a plate of kale—even massaged kale—is not going to get the dinner job done, and when the best-tasting produce of all is at its very best-tasting (on the East Coast, at least).

At times like these, we don't want to be hacking through a leaf forest, fork as machete; we want the good stuff—the stuff that'll fill us up and makes it okay that it's 400° F outside—to be the only stuff. We want the ratio of lettuce to stuff to be 0 : 1 (or 1/5 : 1 at most).

These 32 salads have shed their leaves (or most of them, at least) and are more delicious for it.