Are you a salad lover or a salad dodger? If you fall in the latter camp, we say you just haven’t met the right salad yet. Wilting leaves and a tasteless half a tomato excites precisely nobody. By contrast, a great salad should be bursting with taste, texture and a balance of flavours. All of which is why we love a big bowl filled with delicate leaves, shavings of salty cheese, scatterings of crunchy nuts and some sweet, light fruit to really make the whole colourful affair sing. Whether you knock them back with fizzy water and a slice of lemon, or a good crisp grassy glass of Sauvignon Blanc, these salad recipes are just happiness in a bowl.

Sabrina Ghayour’s Fig, Fresh Percorino And Walnut Salad

Foodism
Sabrina Ghayour

What we love so much about Sabrina Ghayour is her unerring instinct for all the big satisfying flavours. Totally self-taught, she rose to prominence when Sabrina’s Kitchen, her supper club in which she served up Middle Eastern-influenced dishes, gained a huge and devout following. This recipe is taken from her book Sirocco, and we couldn’t love it more. Sweet, salty, syrupy and, moreover, quick, it’s a total winner, especially thanks to the all-important crunch courtesy of the walnuts. Strictly speaking, you should wait until figs are in season a couple of months down the line, but there’s nothing wrong with prepping your act until that moment. No wonder Sabrina was our very first Instagram hero during lockdown.

Mixed Leaf Salad With Mozzarella, Mint, Peach and Prosciutto

Jamie Oliver
Mixed Leaf Salad With Mozzarella, Mint, Peach & Prosciutto

Ever since Jamie Oliver burst onto our screens as the Naked Chef over twenty years ago, he has had the knack of creating dishes that we both really, really want to eat and which are not prohibitively complicated for home cooks. This peach and mozzarella salad is just one such. A slightly less salty cheese than in the previous recipe, the contrast between the sweet and savoury here is a softer one, and it’s completely perfect for eating outside on a warm day (long may they last). During lockdown, this is one sure-fire way to transport yourself to a lovely languid holiday vibe.

Strawberry, Toasted Pecan and Gorgonzola Salad

Waitrose
Strawberry Toasted Pecan And Gorgonzola Salad

There may be no Wimbledon on the horizon this year, but we’ll still be tuning wistfully in to the inevitable heart-gladdening re-runs of classic matches from years gone by to remind us of the event’s glory and what will be again. All of which means that we will still need our strawberry fix. While we’d never mess with a classic and will, rest assured, be mainlining the red beauties with cream, we always like to try a variant. And what better way than with this beautiful looking and tasting salad that comes courtesy of the clever folk at Waitrose? The pecans and zingy gorgonzola give it a welcome bite, and as for the strawberries themselves and the basil? Summer in a bowl.

Waldorf Salad

Delish
Waldorf Salad

Photo credit: Parker Feierbach
The Waldorf Salad hails, of course, from the famous Waldrof-Astoria hotel in New York, apparently invented in 1896 by the maître d'hôtel, Oscar Tschirky for a charity ball in honour of St Mary’s Hospital for Children. It has since become an enduring staple, working perfectly as a starter or a light main, thanks to the tart sweetness of the apples, the bursting flavour of the grapes and the textural addition of the walnuts. We love this Delish rendition of it, which you can’t go wrong with. A classic more than a century on for excellent reason.

By Nancy Alsop
Updated May 2023