A salad seems like one of the easiest things to make all it should take is a fistful of lettuce, a dice of tomato, a drizzle of vinaigrette.

But whether it’s a plate of baby mizuna at a restaurant or Caesar-in-a-bag from the grocery store, so often salads are all wrong. Either the greens are wilted and dripping with oil; the dressing burning with acid; or some ingredients are too heavy and slide off the lettuce into a watery puddle.

Salads so easily can become a clearinghouse for whatever is in the kitchen. Things become muddled if there are raisins and dried cranberries and sweet roasted peppers, or sunflower seeds and cashews and croutons.

The secret to the perfect salad is to strive for what Zen and yoga practitioners seek out every day: simplicity and balance. You could call it the feng shui of salad making. A really good salad provides a sense of harmony.

The flavors dance around each other. It is light and cleansing, but offers a satisfying juxtaposition of textures.

The best path to a balanced salad is to choose a handful of components, including the dressing and greens. Like the five elements that feng shui practitioners try to represent in their environments earth, wood, fire, metal and water the goal is to represent the five flavors on the palate. In addition to sweet, salty, bitter and sour, there’s umami, the elusive fifth flavor that has to do with protein and savory satisfaction. Add to that an array of textures: crisp-juicy, toasty-crunchy and soft-creamy.

A classic Italian fennel Parmesan salad couldn’t be simpler, but it gets the formula just right. The fennel is crisp and sweet while the shards of Parmesan are grainy, salty and full of umami. Lemon juice and olive oil are the yin and yang of the vinaigrette, and lots of freshly ground black pepper adds a sharp edge.

Summer is a wonderful time to practice salad feng shui. With all the corn, tomatoes, bell peppers and green beans that are arriving, there is a whole universe of flavors and colors to bring into harmony.

The path to salad nirvana

Start with a balanced dressing. A plain lettuce salad can be delicious if you get the right balance of acid and oil.

The formula varies as you add more components. Salads with sweet ingredients, such as fresh apples, or fatty things like cheese, take well to more acidic dressings.

It’s easier to achieve the oil-vinegar balance with an emulsified dressing, and these dressings coat the leaves with even flavor.

To emulsify dressing, curl a damp dishtowel into a circle, place it on the kitchen counter and rest a bowl on top to secure it while you whisk. Whisk together the vinegar or other acid with the salt, pepper and herbs or spices until the salt has dissolved (salt doesn’t dissolve as well in oil).

With the whisk in one hand and the bottle of oil in the other, begin drizzling a few drops of oil into the dressing while whisking. When the oil begins to be evenly distributed, start pouring more oil in a thin, steady stream, whisking vigorously all the while, until the vinaigrette is slightly creamy and thick.

Taste the vinaigrette with a lettuce leaf. If the acid still burns a little in the back of your throat, whisk in more oil. If it tastes too fatty, add more vinegar. Then season with salt and pepper if needed.

Other tips

Respect your greens. Mesclun mixes can be great, but a whole head of lettuce stays fresh longer, especially if you keep it in an airtight plastic bag in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator. Supermarkets now carry lettuces with interesting flavors and textures, such as red leaf lettuce, butter lettuce and romaine.

When you’re ready to make the salad, tear or cut the leaves into bite-size pieces. Dunk the leaves in a large bowl of water to allow dirt to fall to the bottom. If the lettuce is really dirty, repeat with fresh water not many things are worse than the feeling of grit between your teeth.

After washing the greens, lift them out of the water; don’t drain in a colander or the dirt will fall back on top. Then dry carefully.

Remove excess liquid. It’s really true, oil and water don’t mix, and one of the biggest pitfalls in salad making is not drying greens properly. Water left on lettuce or other ingredients can break the dressing’s emulsion, preventing it from delicately clinging to the greens.

First, invest in a salad spinner and spin the lettuce leaves until dry this usually requires three rounds of vigorous spinning. Dump out the water between each round.

Discarding seeds from tomatoes is another easy step that cuts down on water.

Cut the tomatoes in half widthwise, scoop out the seeds, and squeeze gently to get rid of more liquid.

When using fresh juice in a dressing gently reduce the juice on the stovetop to get flavor without too much liquid.

Dress the greens in moderation. Too much dressing bogs down a salad. Add the dressing a little at a time as you toss, then taste individual leaves until you achieve a light, even coating.

Season the salad. The flavor of fresh lettuce really shines through when you add a pinch of salt and pepper to the finished salad, even when the dressing is already seasoned.

Always use freshly ground pepper; preground pepper loses flavor within hours. Kosher and sea salts have the cleanest flavor. Also, kosher salt dissolves easily and isn’t as concentrated as iodized and sea salts.

Make ingredients work together. Heavy ingredients can wilt delicate greens and end up at the bottom of the bowl. Select heartier greens to go with items such as cherry tomatoes or orange segments, and cut the ingredients into even dice.

With delicate greens, use lighter ingredients.