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I Came Around on Salads and I Have the Bowl to Prove It
Eight years of not thinking about salad, and then one bowl changed my mind entirely.
October 2, 2026
“Salad”— Image courtesy of Brimly
I have been eating gluten-free for about eight years and in all that time I have thought about salad roughly never.
Not out of dislike. Out of a total lack of curiosity. I had an idea in my head of what a salad was, which was a bowl of greens and then some other business on top, and I never once sat down and asked whether that idea was accurate or whether I had simply inherited it and stopped looking.
I had stopped looking. That is the answer, and it is not a flattering one.
Because here is the thing about an inherited idea. You form it young, usually off the back of one sad plate, and then you carry it around for umpteen years without ever checking it against evidence. Mine was formed somewhere around childhood and I never revisited it, not even when I went gluten-free and spent two years reading every label in the store. I was paying close attention to everything except this.
What changed is that my list got shorter. When the things you can eat keep narrowing, you eventually find yourself standing in front of options you have been walking past for years, looking at them properly for the first time. Salads went from being the thing on the menu I skipped to being something I actually wanted to make.
And I want to acknowledge how odd this is coming from me. I bake. That is my corner and I am very happy in it. I dabble at cooking, and I am not going to oversell myself here, Nash is considerably better at it than I am. So me turning up to tell you about greens is not a thing either of us saw coming.
A few other things shifted at the same time. I started an intermittent fast on the first of September and I have stayed with it, which means I eat later in the day than I used to and I lean harder on vegetables than I ever have. I still bake. I simply do not indulge the way I once did.
And somewhere in all of that, I made the salad in the photo at the top of this page.
Image courtesy of Brimly
Gluten-Free Rosemary Focaccia
Spinach on the side. Pear. Avocado. Pomegranate seeds, which are doing more work than anybody gives them credit for. Pistachios. Raisins. A little of this and a little of that, and somehow the whole thing arrives balanced instead of chaotic.
The dressing is olive oil, honey, mustard, salt and pepper. That is all of it. I am not holding anything back from you.
It is the best salad I have eaten, and I understand that I am the one who made it and am therefore compromised as a witness. I stand by it anyway.
And this is where I have to admit the other thing that got me, which is that they are beautiful. I spend most of my working life trying to make brown things photograph well. Loaves. Cakes. The entire chocolate end of the spectrum. Then you build a bowl like this one and the color is simply there, handed to you, no styling required. Deep red seeds against green. Pale gold pear. The purple-ish green of a pistachio once you have taken the shell off. I did not expect to be won over on aesthetics and yet here we are.
The garnishing is half the fun of it, too. A different nut changes the whole character. A handful of seeds, a few herbs, something pickled, and suddenly it is a different bowl entirely. There is far more room to play than I ever gave it credit for.
Here is the part that still amuses me, as someone who weighs flour and worries about oven temperatures. A salad needs no measurements at all. None. And yet it can be properly balanced if you know what you are reaching for, sweet against bitter, soft against crunchy, something fatty to hold it together. You would also never guess it was vegan, which it is.
There are afternoons where I cannot face a protein. The sous vide, the broiling, the baking, the timing of it. On those days I make a bowl like this instead, and a good one will carry me straight through the afternoon without a single thought about what comes next.
I used to break my fast with other things. A yogurt cup. A little granola. Cream of buckwheat, which I do still love. But my body started having opinions about those bowls, so I went looking elsewhere, and what I found was salads and soups.
The soups are a whole separate conversation and I will get to them, because they have become their own obsession and I have far too much to say about them for the end of a post about greens.
Image courtesy of Brimly
Gluten-Free Sausage & Onion Pizza
Which brings me to a question I have been turning over for a few weeks now.
I have been making enough of these that I keep wondering about a proper section for them. Salads, soups, the vegetable end of things. And then I remember that we are bakers here. Brimly is a bakery at heart and I have no interest in waking up one morning having accidentally built a salad bar.
So it sits in the back seat for now while I work out where it could live. I am not giving up on the idea. I simply have not found its spot.
The other reason this has taken hold, and I may as well be honest about it, is that my list of things I cannot or will not eat is long. Longer than most people's. That could be a miserable way to live and some days it is, but it has also made me relentless about inventing. If the thing I want does not exist, I build something adjacent to it out of what I do have, and then I change one ingredient and build it again.
Salads reward that more than almost anything else I make. There is no structure to protect, no proofing time, nothing to ruin. You swap something in, you taste it, you decide. It is the least precious cooking there is and I find that enormously relaxing after a week of weighing flour to the gram.
Anyway. If you are not a salad person, which I understand completely because I was not one either, start with this one. It is five or six ingredients and a dressing you can make in a jar. Tell me how it goes. Tell me if it is not for you, that is fine too.
I never expected to write a post talking up greens. Here I am doing it. Things change more than you would think.
Image courtesy of Brimly
Gluten-Free Dark Molasses Buckwheat Loaf
One More Thing!
Since I have raised it, I may as well put it to you properly. Would you want a salad and soup section here? A place for the vegetable side of things, separate from the baking, so it has somewhere to live without taking over.
I genuinely cannot decide, so your opinion counts for more than usual this week. Write and tell me yes or no. I will go with the room.
Thanks for reading, and see you next Friday.
Write to me at hello@brimly.co. Past issues are archived here.
Stephnie Grace is a recipe developer, editor, and co-founder of Brimly, specializing in gluten-free, soy-free, and gum-free baking. She writes Room Temperature, which lands every Friday.
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Steph writes about what actually happens in a gluten-free kitchen. Sends weekly.
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