Technique #7: Salt Vegetables for Not-Soggy Slaws and Salads

But all that water can make it challenging to use them successfully in one of their most common applications: salads.

If those veggies release a lot of their liquid after you’ve tossed them with the dressing, you’ll end up with a diluted, soggy, unappetizing dish that’s more soup than salad. A great illustration of this issue is vegetable slaw. Who among us hasn’t suffered through bland, watery, soggy slaw and longed for a better way?

With meat, we want to preserve as much of the interior moisture as possible, but when it comes to vegetables, more often we are trying to get the water out. But despite the fact that we have opposite goals for vegetables and meat, the same ingredient achieves both ends: salt.

When salt is applied to vegetables, it dissolves on the surface. In order to equalize the salt concentration levels, the water deep within the cells migrates outward in a process called osmosis—the same process that’s at work with brining and salting meat.

With meat, we wait until the water is reabsorbed back into the cells, carrying the salt along with it, before cooking. But with vegetables, we want to quickly remove most of that excess moisture.

This exodus of water from the cells also causes the cells to weaken, which translates into the vegetables becoming softer (a bonus when it comes time to eat tougher or harder vegetables like cabbage or beets). The overall process is similar to tossing chopped fruit with sugar and letting it sit before using it in a pie or crisp (a process known as macerating). Using sugar works with vegetables, too, though more slowly. Incorporating a bit of sugar can be a way to draw out water without making the veggies too salty.