[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at... More

This warm potato salad, adapted from one of my favorite cookbooks, Salad as a Meal: Healthy Main Dish Salads for Every Season by Patricia Wells, is a welcome change from the typical American-style potato salad loaded with mayonnaise. More

When asparagus is truly in season, like at this exact moment, the vegetable is so sweet and tender it doesn't even need to be cooked. Just thinly slice the stalks, dress them with a vinaigrette, and you're left with a stunningly simple fresh asparagus salad. The only catch is that they are often light, bordering on the insubstantial. This recipe from Mindy Fox's Salads: Beyond the Bowl solves that problem by adding red quinoa. More

Salad for dinner always sounds virtuous, but not necessarily all that fulfilling (or just plain filling at all). Flipping through Mindy Fox's most recent cookbook Salads: Beyond the Bowl, it's clear that Fox, who is the food editor at La Cucina Italiana magazine, is trying to stretch the definition of what a salad can be. It's also refreshing that her range of flavors goes way beyond Italian food, like in this twist on Asian sesame noodles. More

[Photograph: David Loftus] What Worked: This salad is all about perfectly balanced contrasts—bitter endive and radicchio dressed with a bracingly tart dressing that cuts through the chewy fattiness of the pig's ear. What Didn't: If you're big into the nasty... More

There's a reason this Crispy Pork and Watermelon Salad is the signature dish at Zakary Pelaccio's Fatty Crab restaurants. It highlights the best of Pelaccio's cooking style, combining his love of Southeast Asian flavors with an irreverent American lean. More

Adapted from The Kitchen Diaries. [Photograph: Blake Royer] Why I Picked This Recipe: Though I've ordered this type of salad at restaurants before, I've never tried it at home, and I was eager to play with Slater's proportions in the... More

Spring is here and with it come many stalks of wonderfully green asparagus, and while we love them simply steamed, drowned with hollandaise or topped off with a wobbly poached egg, we're thinking this Asparagus Kerabu from Zak Pelaccio's Eat with Your Hands might just be our asparagus go to for the season. More

This Hanger Steak Salad from Zakary Pelaccio's Eat with Your Hands isn't much of a salad at all. It's really slices of beefy hanger steak dressed roaring hot with a Southeast Asian dressing and a handful of basil and cilantro. But there's no need to argue semantics when a steak or salad or whatever you want to call it is this good. The real story here is steak plus fish sauce and chiles equals awesome. More

This fun deconstructed Niçoise salad features herb-seared rare tuna tossed with potatoes, haricots verts, tomatoes, olives, anchovies, capers, and lemon-thyme citronette, all spooned into handy lettuce cups. More