If you’ve ever eaten a salad for dinner and thought “I am only here for the croutons,” then let me say that you are heard, and you are seen. It may sound dramatic, but a dinner salad without those golden hunks of salty, crunchy bread in the mix can leave me feeling downright deprived.

Luckily, I have a salad for you that is extremely crouton-forward. Not just any croutons, but “hand-torn” croutons. It’s an annoyingly pretentious phrase, but for any eye-rollers out there, it’s the haphazard tearing into irregular, craggly-edged chunks, rather than meticulously cubing them with a knife, that makes them spectacular. This inexact technique allows some of the bits of bread to fall away and become crumblike and crunchy, while the rest stay larger, like delicious golden-brown geodes with wild-looking exteriors and tender, chewy insides.