Side dishes · Green salads & slaws

Caesar salad

Name: Caesar salad
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 25 min
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients: 2 hearts romaine lettuce, chopped, washed and dried; 3 slices white bread, cubed; 1 1/2 tbsp olive oil; 1/3 cup mayonnaise; 1/2 cup grated parmesan; juice of 1/2 lemon; 1 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard; 3 fillets anchovies, minced; 1 clove garlic, grated; 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce; plenty black pepper

The most famous salad in the world, with a real dressing: anchovy, garlic, lemon, parmesan. Made honestly it's a dish, not a garnish — and the dressing is where the calories hide.

Time: 25 min (15 prep + 10 cook)
Servings: 4
Per serving: 318 kcal
Protein: 8 g

Both directions are legitimate — the score measures fullness per calorie, not virtue. Every version is the same dish, rebalanced.

Ingredients

2 hearts romaine lettuce, chopped, washed and dried400 g

Croutons

3 slices white bread, cubed90 g
1 1/2 tbsp olive oil20 g

Dressing

1/3 cup mayonnaise80 g
1/2 cup grated parmesan40 g
juice of 1/2 lemon20 g
1 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard8 g
3 fillets anchovies, minced12 g
1 clove garlic, grated5 g
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce5 g

plenty black pepper1 g

Every ingredient links to its food page — same data, same score, same formula.

Steps

Toss the bread cubes in the oil and toast in a 200°C oven until golden, about 10 minutes, shaking once.
Whisk every dressing ingredient together. Taste it — it should be sharper and saltier than seems right; the lettuce dilutes it.
Dry the romaine properly. Dressing slides off wet leaves and pools at the bottom.
Toss the lettuce with the dressing, then the croutons, and finish with more parmesan and pepper.

Do I really need the anchovies?

Don't fear the anchovies — they dissolve into pure savouriness, and a caesar without them is ranch with a title. The bottled dressings score worse than this one and taste like the bottle.

Alternative

Chicken caesar saladwith grilled chicken, as a meal45

Why this score

easy to overeat

Dense calories with little protein, volume or fiber to fill you up.

Three routes to fullness — one is enough

9% of kcal

71% water

9 g/Mcal

What pulls it down

How scores work

Computed on the finished dish, not an average of the parts: 1271 kcal goes into the pot, 681 g of ingredients comes out as ~700 g of food → 182 kcal per 100 g. Cooking moves water, and energy density is the score's biggest lever — so we show the math. Full formula here.

Per

Calories: 182
Protein: (9%); 4 g
Fat: (68%); 14 g
Carbohydrates: (23%); 10 g
of which sugar: 2 g
Fiber: 2 g
Sodium: 327 mg

Percentages are the share of calories from each macronutrient.

Computed from the ingredients' USDA data — nothing typed by hand. Every number is traceable, every score recomputable.

More side dishes

Photo: AI-generated. Nutrition and score are computed from the ingredients with the published formula — this recipe hasn't been kitchen-tested by us yet.