SkinnyLicious® Salads

The Cheesecake Factory has posted the recipe for this salad on its own site, so you can see exactly what goes into it.

Arugula over beets, orange segments and avocado, with radish, crispy quinoa and a pinch of Maldon salt, the flaky sea salt made in Maldon, Essex, since 1882. 290 calories. The fat, 12 grams, is the lowest of the five SkinnyLicious salads.

7 grams of protein won't carry you through the afternoon. Order it as a starter. No gluten or wheat is listed, only milk and soy.

260 calories, with 25 grams of fat and 2 grams of protein. Fat supplies about 87% of those calories, so the vinaigrette is doing most of the work.

The menu describes it in four words, tossed in our vinaigrette, and it's the smallest salad in the SkinnyLicious section on calories, carbs and sodium alike.

Order it as a side. Ask for the dressing separately. Then use half.

2,080 mg of sodium in a 550-calorie SkinnyLicious salad, the second-highest salt figure among the five salads in that section.

The calories are genuinely light. The salt isn't. Grilled chicken, black beans, corn, greens and cilantro sit on a crisp corn tortilla, with salsa and avocado cream on top. It's also the most carb-heavy salad in its section, at 59 grams.

29 grams of protein. Order the vinaigrette on the side and you take control of the one salted component you can actually see.

16 grams of carbohydrate, fewer than any other salad in the section, including the 190-calorie Tossed Green Salad.

Tataki is a Japanese technique from Kōchi, on the island of Shikoku, where bonito is seared over a straw fire just long enough to colour the outside and then sliced. Here the fish is ahi, left raw in the centre. That's what the asterisk warns about.

Avocado, tomato, cilantro, sesame and soy go over mixed greens in shallot vinaigrette, for 450 calories and 34 grams of protein. No milk or egg is listed. It's the salad I'd order at lunch.

2,810 mg of sodium. That's more than the entire Factory Nachos platter, in a salad of 570 calories.

The sesame-soy dressing is the obvious source, so get it on the side.

Otherwise, the numbers are good. 37 grams of protein is the most in the section, and it comes with 1,060 fewer calories than the full Chinese Chicken Salad, with grilled chicken, romaine, carrots, bean sprouts, rice noodles, wontons, almonds and sesame underneath. Almonds mean tree nuts.

250 calories lighter than the full Factory Chopped Salad. The ingredient list barely changes.

Julienne romaine, chicken, tomato, avocado, corn, bacon, blue cheese and apple get the SkinnyLicious vinaigrette instead of the regular dressing, so the savings come mostly from portion and dressing, and 34 grams of protein matches the full salad exactly.

530 calories. 11 grams of fiber. Of the five SkinnyLicious salads it has the most fat, 29 grams.

At 190 calories it's the lightest of the seven salads in its section, but the menu's own words are mixed greens, assorted vegetables, tomato and croutons with your choice of dressing, and the dressing is where the number moves.

Croutons explain the gluten. Milk is listed too. 6 grams of protein.

Pick a vinaigrette and ask for it on the side. $11.95.