I made Olivia Wilde's salad recipe and now I'm even more confused about the 'special' dressing

In November 2020, People reported that Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis had decided to end their seven-year engagement. The pair share a son named Otis and a daughter named Daisy.

Wilde and Harry Styles were then linked romantically for the first time in January 2021, when Page Six shared photos of the duo at the wedding of Styles' manager.

While the actress claimed that her split from Sudeikis was amicable, the family's former nanny told the Daily Mail that wasn't the case and that the "Ted Lasso" star was "brokenhearted" — so much so that he laid under her car one night so she wouldn't drive off with a salad and dressing she had made for Styles.

"Jason told me: 'She made this salad and she made her special dressing and she's leaving with her salad to have dinner with [Harry],'" the nanny told the Daily Mail.

Now, let's get one thing straight: It's probably not about the dressing. Breakups are wild and can really throw you for a loop. I feel for you, Jason.

But, I also know that a good salad dressing can similarly throw you for a loop — disrupting your entire reality around what salads and even just well-dressed greens could be. It can turn a salad hater into a fiend for leafy greens. It can leave you pining over acidic, citrusy frisée from a now-closed restaurant like you pine over your ex who moved away.

So after seeing that this salad and dressing was apparently important enough for Sudeikis to include in text messages to his children's nanny, I wanted to get a taste of it myself.

I came across a recipe credited to Wilde on Food Network for a roasted salmon salad with zucchini and potatoes. In it, there are two separate dressing recipes, one is a basic vinaigrette and the other is a lemony dill dressing meant for seasoning the salmon.

After salad-dressing-gate went viral on Tuesday, she posted an Instagram story of a page in Nora Ephron's "Heartburn." In the center of the page was the recipe for a vinaigrette with red wine vinegar, Grey Poupon, and olive oil.

The novelist's dressing recipe was similar to — but not the same as — the one in Wilde's recipe. So I stuck with the one she put her name on.

This recipe has two separate components: the salmon and veggies, and the salad and vinaigrette.

For the first part, I needed olive oil, garlic, dill, shallot, lemon, crushed red pepper flakes, smoked paprika, a potato, zucchini, kosher salt, ground black pepper, and a skinless salmon fillet.

The second required red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, honey, kosher salt, garlic, olive oil, mixed greens, kalamata olives, feta, and cucumber.

I made the first dressing of this meal by combining 1/4 cup of olive oil, 4 cloves of garlic (finely chopped), three sprigs of dill (chopped), 1/2 shallot (finely chopped), 1/2 lemon (juice only), a pinch of red pepper flakes, and a pinch of smoked paprika in a jar and shaking vigorously.

Then, I peeled and sliced the russet potato, sliced the zucchini, and sliced the other half of my shallot and layered those on an oiled sheet of parchment paper. I laid the salmon fillet on top in the center and drizzled it with half of my dressing mixture.

This dressing, I thought, was amazing. It was bright and acidic from the lemon, luxurious from the olive oil, textured by the garlic and shallot, and had an extra punch of flavor from the dill.

Unfortunately, because Wilde posted the Ephron excerpt, I do not believe this is the "special dressing" in question.

The recipe is labeled at skill level "easy," but the fact that this one step is required makes it a little more difficult.

Cooking anything in parchment paper — or en paupiette — makes for a deliciously moist dish, but it's not easy to put together. The only reason why this step alone didn't take me 30 minutes was that I had done this before. The first time I tried it, there was a lot of trial and error involved.

I could sit here and describe to you how I haphazardly pinched and tucked and squeezed the edges of the parchment together, rolling them in toward the center until it appeared to be sealed, but you'd be better off watching a YouTube tutorial.

Now, this more closely resembles the dressing recipe from Ephron's story.

Wilde's recipe combines 2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar, 1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard, 1 teaspoon of honey, one clove of garlic (chopped), and a pinch of kosher salt. Then, she asks home cooks to stir in 2 to 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a steady stream.

In my opinion, the ratios were way off. It felt unbalanced in flavor and, as a result, was extremely vinegar-forward, which overpowered the rest of the ingredients as well as the salad as a whole.

The second to last step in this very involved salad-making extravaganza was dressing the greens and then adding the 1/4 cucumber (sliced into 1/4-inch "coins"), 2 tablespoons of kalamata olives (pitted), and 2 tablespoons of crumbled feta.

Wilde didn't call for the olives to be chopped or sliced or altered in any way. Each tablespoon held five olives, so there were 10 olives total in this salad, which felt odd to me. She also didn't specify what kind of cucumber to use or the total amount of "coins" to slice, which makes a big difference in how much ends up being in the finished dish (I used a long English cucumber, so 1/4 of it yielded a lot of the green discs).

Again, the ratios seemed off.

In the Thanksgiving episode of "Friends" season six, Jennifer Aniston's character makes an English trifle for dessert. Her dish consists of sweet elements like custard and jam, and then a surprise savory element of beef sautéed with peas and onions. It's perplexing enough to other characters who fact-check her work and find out that she accidentally combined two completely separate recipes. This, dear reader, is exactly what came to mind as I built and then tasted Wilde's salad.

The salmon, zucchini, and potatoes felt like one complete dish, and the greens, olives, feta, and cucumber part of her recipe felt like the basic beginnings of a Greek-style salad.

My skepticism was met with validation when I loaded the protein on top of the salad and took a few bites. The salmon was very good. The zucchini, potatoes, shallots, and lemon dressing were very good. The raw veggies and feta were fine. But together, it made no sense to me.

If this is how Wilde builds her special recipes, I question whether that salad dressing was the stuff gastronomical dreams are made of, or if it was just the last straw for a distressed man getting left.