Top 8 takeaway salads tested
I recently noticed one of those benches outside the Lettercollum Kitchen Project shop and deli in Clonakilty where you can buy the freshest of salads from produce grown in the owners’ garden.
In Waterford there is Ardeen Stores; in Galway, McCambridges; in Midleton, the Farm Gate; and in Nenagh, Country Choice. In Dublin the selection in Fallon & Byrne is hard to beat, but there are other excellent deli’s in and around the city.
This week I concentrated my shopping in Cork, looking at some supermarket brands available nationwide, as well as excellent local retailers.
You can get your five (at least) a day in a bowl of salad, along with a decent amount of protein for sustenance, some natural fibre and some good fats for good measure.
Some of the products below can, of course, be made at home and will be more economical, especially when well planned. Wash salad leaves, shake dry and refrigerate in a sealed bag or box.
Cooked grains are trickier to store as bacteria lodge and multiply easily in food that has small grains and bits. So, for the days when you want a treat, read on...
These salads provided the most difficult of choices, but I was very happy with mine of quinoa, spelt and pickled fennel; kale, quinoa and roasted cranberries with garlic; wild garlic couscous with radish and green chilli, all on a bed of salad leaves with optional toppings including a delicious butterbean crush and a mint and garlic yoghurt. Everything was freshly made, zinging with flavour.
Very, very good. At Princes Street, Cork.
In a plastic bowl with roasted red peppers and a little tub of lemon and coriander dressing, the couscous is certainly large. And it’s quite soft too, made from wheat, like pasta. The flavours work well together with plenty of feta for protein. Red peppers and spring onions provide a gentle flavour, while green ltentils give it its bite. A satisfying tubful for an easy, healthy lunch.
As the chicken was skinned we didn’t get any taste of chargrilling, but there was enough of it to be satisfying. It was mixed with bulgar wheat, chopped tomato and cucumber, spring onion and vinaigrette. The mint wasn’t really discernible.
Unremarkable, but pleasant.
In an oval plastic bowl segmented to keep ingredients separated until mixed with a fork provided, there are tomato croutons (quite tasty), black olives and sundried tomatoes (nicely plump), feta cheese and ‘green multi-leaf’, which is a frisée type mixed with rocket. The dressing is quite acidic and there wasn’t quite enough of it to cover the decent number of leaves. Good for an easy lunch.
A mix of salad leaves including red chicory, escarole (the frilly one), radicchio and lollo rossa, red onions (not cut thinly enough) and shredded carrot. My tub had three cherry tomatoes. This sized tub, which is enough for two, could be good as a base for lunch, though there is no dressing. For a balanced meal, add a hardboiled egg, cheese, cold meat or fish.
A square plastic tub is divided into three with leaves in the bottom one — a mix of baby spinach leaves, courgette, rocket, pea shoots and mange tout. Another small section has dried cranberries, pumpkin seeds, goji berries (fashionable, but at odds with the other flavours), pine nuts and sunflower seeds. The third section has soya beans which provide some protein. The lemon and basil dressing has rapeseed oil as its base and is nicely mustardy. But I would have liked a larger sachet of it.
In a plastic carton, this colourful combination is a complete meal in itself with plenty of protein from feta cheese, edamame (soybeans) and cannellini beans, quinoa and kamut (an increasingly fashionable revived ancient grain), yellow split peas and green lentils. They are all quite toothsome and satisfying, so a decent, sustaining lunch.
From a selection of freshly made salads, I chose as many as I fancied as the price is by weight of €13 per kg. I tried couscous, butterbeans, mixed leaves, and a carrot, celeriac and beetroot mix, which were all delicious. A yoghurt dressing topped it off nicely. Well worth trying at the English Market Cork, opposite O’Connell’s fish stall.
