15x super-delicious salad recipes you’ll want to add to your repertoire right away
La-la-la, give us salad! And no, of course not the boring lettuce-tomato-cucumber combination… YAWN. We have some more exciting salads in our repertoire. These are our 15 absolute favorites, so you can add them to yours.
And that means you can shine during the office lunch, barbecue or camping picnic!
1. A perfect pasta salad
I’ll simply start with the best of the best: a perfect pasta salad. Who wouldn’t spontaneously cheer at that? Easy to make, incredibly filling and endlessly versatile. You do need to avoid a few crucial mistakes: never use fresh pasta, for example. But other than that, we simply can’t think of a scenario in which this wouldn’t be a success at the table.
2. Panzanella
Panzanella is an Italian bread salad. It’s super simple and sustainable too, because it’s a fantastic way to use up stale bread. With good olive oil, juicy tomatoes and bright green basil leaves, you have an amazing meal on the table that instantly transports you in your mind to a terrace somewhere in the heart of Tuscany.
3. Main-course salad with pear and gorgonzola
Some ingredients that initially seem to have absolutely nothing to do with each other turn out to combine fantastically. Take pear and gorgonzola. The juicy sweetness of the pear and the spicy, salty flavor of gorgonzola are a party in your mouth. Just imagine what that would taste like in a main-course salad. Exactly: hurry to the cheesemonger and greengrocer.
4. Roasted beet salad with stracciatella and hazelnuts
Love sweet flavors? Then try this roasted beet salad, finished with stracciatella and crunchy hazelnuts. The earthy beets make it a lovely autumn salad, but I also absolutely love it on a hot summer day. And it’s a colorful painting on your plate, too!
5. Surinamese papaya salad
In summer, we often like to seek out tropical vibes. In that case, this Surinamese papaya salad should not be missing from your summer table. Fruity from the papaya, spicy from the Madame Jeanette pepper, herby from the cilantro and with a touch of umami from the fish sauce. Each flavor brings out the best in the others and puts you in a summer state of mind.
6. Simple but delicious Caesar salad
It may be one of the best-known salads: the Caesar salad. It was once created by a chef who quickly threw something together with whatever he still had in the fridge. Could he ever have imagined that we would now eat his creation all over the world? A classic like this absolutely belongs on our list.
7. Noodle salad with shrimp and mango
If you can make pasta salad, why not noodle salad too? We’re going for this noodle salad with fresh shrimp and mango. You serve it in a crisp lettuce leaf, which also makes this salad a little different from the others. Admittedly, you need quite a few ingredients to get it on the table. But that’s not a problem at all, because you’ll want to make this one more often—and then you’ll already have a large part of what you need at home.
8. Warm potato salad (by Julius Jaspers)
Is there any salad that goes better with a barbecue than warm potato salad? Okay, perhaps Russian salad. Here at the editorial office, we love Julius Jaspers’ recipe. Simply because we find it so deliciously creamy, with a little sharpness from the onion and mustard. Have some left over after the barbecue? Lucky you, because you can easily take the rest for lunch the next day.
9. Watermelon and mozzarella salad
A little like pear and gorgonzola: watermelon and mozzarella are also a golden (or, actually, white-and-pink) combination. In this watermelon and mozzarella salad, the latter ingredients absolutely steal the show. It’s also wonderful to eat on a hot day, because besides a hundred boxes of popsicles, watermelon is the only thing that really cools us down.
10. The classic salade Niçoise
Almost as classic as Caesar salad: salade Ni̧oise. At its core, you’ll taste tuna, eggs, tomatoes and olives. It originally comes from the French city of Nice. I wish my city (Breda) were the birthplace of such a world-famous phenomenon…
11. Chickpea salad with salmon and feta
With this chickpea salad with salmon and feta—created by Mounir Toub—you’ll be full for the rest of the afternoon. Bet? The salmon and chickpeas make the salad incredibly filling. Plus whipped feta, a trend we’ve naturally seen passing by on social media countless times already.
12. Fig salad with Parmesan cheese
Besides pear and gorgonzola and watermelon and mozzarella, there’s another fruit-and-cheese combination you absolutely have to try: figs and Parmesan. Try this fig salad with Parmesan. One of the tastiest recipes from Welmoed Benzel’s Salad Bible, if you ask us. Bonus: no endless shopping list!
13. BLT salad with smoked chicken
We also love salads because they’re so easy to take with you. To work, to the campsite, to a picnic… In all cases, we recommend this BLT salad with chicken. It is, indeed, essentially the BLT sandwich in salad form. Turning something unhealthy into a kind-of-healthy outfit.
14. Thai steak salad with tomatoes
When you think of salad, you automatically think of vegetables. In the saddest case, perhaps immediately of the lifeless lettuce-tomato-cucumber trio. But meat works perfectly well in a salad too. This delicious Thai steak salad proves it. A hearty meal that also works perfectly well for dinner. And mark my words: you’ll want to make that dressing with soy sauce, lime and pul biber more often.
15. Main-course salad with roasted salmon
Flaky salmon, spicy dressing and crisp leafy greens: these are the main reasons they love this main-course salad with salmon by Emily Ezekiel. Easy to make, because your oven does part of the work. Her book Main-course Salads is definitely one you’ll want on your shelf!
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