It’s no mystery that salad can be pretty underwhelming. It’s never the star of the meal and is often ignored- unless you’re paying $11.25 to have greens fit for a Kardashian. The now infamous “hand salad,” created by Bon Appétit, however, is nothing but an embarrassment of lettuce.
Anatomy of the “Hand Salad.”
The “hand salad” is made up of a firm lettuce and a yogurt lemon dressing on the side. Instead of combining the two to make a traditional salad, this recipe insists using the dressing as a dip. It also seems to lose all health benefits that a salad would have by having a bowl of dressing as a main ingredient. “We call this a hand salad because lettuce and dip just doesn’t sound like nearly as much fun,” said the writer, Amiel Stanek.
This is not the first time a “hand salad” has been written about on Bon Appetit. Last May, the same author wrote a recipe for a similar lettuce and dip combo. This time, the dressing was a buttermilk base with grapefruit and mixed seeds.
Nearly a year later, a “hand salad” recipe was written again for the magazine’s $40 Dinner Party piece. In this article, Stanek addressed the weird nature of the salad. “Okay, so my editors have told me that the last time I tried to write about “hand salad”—basically big pieces of lettuce in a bowl with dressing in a bowl, chips and dip style—some people on The Internet had a cow. ‘THAT’S NOT A THING,’ they raged, ‘WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE THAT A THING?!'”
When the recipe was posted on Twitter, the Internet just couldn’t deal. Here are some of the best responses:
Many Twitter users spent the day trolling the magazine for this ludicrous recipe, while some went so far as to say that they would walk out of a restaurant is they saw “hand salad” on the menu. Regardless, this take on the traditional salad is unforgettable.