TRAY SALADS. TRAY CUTE.

The tray salad has changed how I make salad. It's dinner, on a tray, that happens to be a salad as well. Here's how to slay the tray salad - AND have wrinkle-free peas, to boot.

There’s this:

“What’s for dinner?”

“Salad”.

“Oh.”

Then there’s this:

“What’s for dinner?”

“Roast chicken, potato and peas”

“Yay!”

“But as a salad”.

“Yep, not a problem”.

That’s where the tray salad comes in. Instead of cooking something nice and serving it with a salad, you basically serve something nice on a salad. This is, to put it mildly, genius. Some possibilities:

# A tray of soft lettuces on which you break up pinkly cooked king salmon and avocado, with red kidney beans, jalapeno chillies, lots of lime juice, and corn chips.

# A springy mattress base of Asian herbs – mint, Thai basil, coriander - on which you strew rice vermicelli, rare beef and snake beans.

# A bed of juicy, sprightly tabbouleh, topped with pan-fried haloumi.

# Light and lovely couscous, spiked with preserved lemon, strewn with pan-fried whiting and drizzled with chermoula.

# Any salad you care to name – Nicoise, Lyonnaise, Caesar, Greek. You may have made it a hundred times before, but having to rethink it as a tray salad makes it fresh again.

# Strew your tray salad with tuna, prawns, roast baby carrots, soft-boiled and halved eggs, or potato crisps.

# Jehan’s summer salad with wagyu chuck from The Ethical Omnivore by sustainable Sydney butcher Feather & Bone is a perfect example of a tray salad.

# My new favourite tray salad, below, inspired by Sunday roast chicken, with loads of greens, roast poussin (spatchcock), spuds and peas – and a gravy vinaigrette. 

Sunday roast chicken tray salad with gravy vinaigrette

Yes, this is basically your Sunday roast chicken complete with potatoes and peas, BUT AS A SALAD.  And with a gravy vinaigrette. 

No, I haven’t lost it. The gravy vinaigrette is a little French trick I was taught by the late, great Alain Chapel, when I ate at his three-star restaurant Chapel at Mionnay, near Lyons, about three hundred years ago.  He always whisked the pan juices into the vinaigrette for his roast chicken salad, and I have done so ever since.

• 2 x 600 g Game Farm spatchcock (poussin)

• 2 garlic cloves

• 2 tbsp olive oil

• 1 tsp dried oregano

• 2 decent-sized spuds, peeled

• 150 g frozen peas

• Quick pickle of red onion ( see note below)

• 2 baby cos lettuces

• Bag of rocket leaves

  Gravy vinaigrette:

• 2 tbsp lime juice

• 1 big tbsp natural yoghurt

• 1 big tsp Dijon mustard

• 2 tbsp roasting pan juices (or, indeed, gravy)

• Sea salt

1/ Heat oven to 210 C (conventional). Clean the poussins, pat dry, chuck a garlic clove inside. Place on a baking tray, rub with olive oil and scatter with oregano and sea salt.

2/ Roast the poussins for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until crisp-skinned and golden, then remove and rest for 15 minutes.

3/ To make the vinaigrette, combine lime juice, yoghurt, mustard, pan juices and sea salt in a bowl and whisk until frothy. Lighten with a dash of water if too thick.

4/ Cut the potatoes into bite-sized pieces and cook in simmering salted water for around 10 minutes until tender, and drain. They’ll be more interesting if you give them a quick roll in the dressing while still hot, then set them aside. Cook the peas in boiling salted water for 30 seconds and drain.

5/ Separate the cos leaves and tear any large ones. Toss with the rocket in half the dressing and scatter over serving platter/tray.

6/ Break up the chicken in your hands – keep in manageable pieces or shred even further, and arrange on top. Tuck in potatoes and scatter with peas and quick-pickled red onion. Spoon on remaining dressing and serve.

TWO FRIENDS OF SALAD.

Quick red onion pickle: Take half a red onion and finely slice it. Toss with a teaspoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt. Douse in 2 tbsp red wine vinegar, toss well and leave for 30 minutes.  I usually lift them out at that point, and use the vinegar in a salad dressing.

Instagram peas: Peas are just the best – until they go all wrinkly. For perfect, cartoonishly round, pea-green peas, cook them in simmering salted water for 30 seconds, then drain and toss into a bowl of icy-cold water with ice-cubes in it. Leave them in the water until you build the salad. Counter-intuitively, they taste fresher and sweeter after their soak.

See what I mean? No wrinkles. I’ve invented Botox peas.

There are very few things to remember when making a tray salad:

• Have more greens than non-greens. It should LOOK like a salad.

• Tear the lettuce apart in your hands rather than cut, which helps it pick up the dressing on the jagged edges.

• Go big or go home. Choose your biggest tray or platter and go to town, make it beautiful.

• Do not arrange your food in rows or in spirals. The people who follow you on Instagram for such nonsense are not the sort of followers you want.

YOU’LL BE NEEDING A TRAY.

Try the classic English brand Falcon enamelware with its chic blue trim – added bonus, it is both oven-proof and heat-proof. My Scandi ceramic tray is from iittala, available at David Jones. Country Road also has some lovely ones. And oh, the colours (yellow, wasabi, blossom) of this Paris platter from Mud Australia.

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Thanks for reading – feel free to add a comment, or share with a friend, or subscribe for more Jill Dupleix Eats in your inbox every Thursday.  And special thanks to Terry Durack, whose natural suspicion of salads inspired me to build them into something more Durack-worthy.

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I am proud to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands and waters upon which I work, live, cook and play - the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation - and fully support the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to be enshrined in Australia’s Constitution.