This post contains affiliate links. Click on the link to see our disclosure here.
A cool crisp chef's salad sometimes hits the spot when the temperature is in the 90s. Just top your favorite lettuce with your favorite salad ingredients and enjoy!
This chef's salad recipe makes a great dinner salad. You don't need anything else. It is full of lettuce, eggs, meat, and cheese, topped with some crunchy croutons and the dressing of your choice.
This salad is easy to make; all the prep work can be done before hand and assembled when you want it. It is also very versatile; you can use any lettuce that you like or add two different kinds, like we did. We used iceberg and bib for ours. You can also pick the meat and cheese that you and your family like and top the lettuce with them. You might not add chicken like on a Caesar salad, but you pick any deli meat that you like. The dressing that we use is thousand island, but you can use the dressing that you prefer.
Ingredients:
- Iceberg lettuce- nice and crispy, always great on a salad.
- Bib lettuce- a soft but great texture.
- Shredded carrots- easy to chew and lay on a salad rather than chunks of carrots.
- English cucumber- great flavor and soft skin, plus, not a lot of seeds!
- Grape tomatoes- we thought grape tomatoes make a nice addition to the chef's salad, but you can use any tomatoes; just cut them up.
- Crisp bacon- Adds extra flavor to any salad.
- Red onions- Typical on a chef's salad and with good reason, they are very tasty!
- Hard-boiled eggs- Added protein and extra flavor for your salad.
- Sharp cheese- Our favorite is cracker barrel sharp cheddar, so we shredded it and used that, but you can use any cheese that you like.
- Swiss cheese- a staple for chef's salad, but again, use what you want.
- Shredded ham- We bought some at the deli and had it shaved. We like it better than pieces of ham sliced down.
- Avocado- We think it is a great addition to any salad. It has that soft texture and great taste along with some healthy fats.
Making the salad:
This salad makes a great presentation in a big bowl, or on a charcuterie board; it's your choice! You can also make the salad as big as you want or as small as you want. We started with the lettuce, then removed the core and cut it into 6 wedges, then sliced them into bite-size pieces. We then washed the lettuce. Did the same with both kinds of lettuce. Refrigerate until ready to serve. We put it onto a big charcuterie board.
Next, we took the cheeses and ham and added them to the lettuce, we shredded the cheddar and used sliced Swiss cheese, cut into strips.
For the vegetables, we used an English cucumber and cut it down the middle, then sliced it into half wheels. The store sells bags of shredded carrots, so we used them, but you can shred your own if you like. For the tomatoes, we used grape tomatoes. They are nice and juicy, but left whole they don't get on the other ingredients and if you have people who don't like tomatoes. We even added avocados, just because they taste good in a salad!
You can't have a chef's salad recipe without onions. so we cut a red onion in half and sliced it very thin, then sliced them into smaller pieces. Bacon was also added for great flavor, just fry them crisp and cut into small pieces. To finish the salad, take some hard boiled eggs and cut them into four pieces before adding them onto the salad.
We used a classic thousand island dressing for the salad. We think it is a good choice for this kind of salad, but you can always use whatever dressing that you like. Again, the choice is yours!
PrintChef's Salad
Ingredients
- 1 head of iceberg lettuce, rinsed and diced
- 1 head of bib lettuce, rinsed and diced
- 1 small pack of grape tomatoes
- 1 large red onion, diced into strips
- 1 bag shredded carrots
- 1 English cucumber, seeds scooped out
- 2 avocados, sliced into pieces
- deli ham, shaved
- Shredded sharp cheese, such as cheddar
- Sliced deli cheese, such as Swiss, cut into strips
- 4 Hard boiled eggs, cut into fours
- ½ pound bacon, crisp and in pieces
Instructions
- In a bowl, pile your lettuce in a bowl or a charcuterie board to use for a bed of your salad.
- Add the tomatoes, onions, carrots, cucumber, avocados, ham, cheeses, and bacon in rows next to one another. wherever it seems right to you.
- Finally, add the hard-boiled egg quarters all around the salad to make it look nice.
- Plate up on smaller plates and serve with thousand island dressing or you favorite dressing.
Here are some other salads that you might like
Tasty Chicken Caesar Salad
Comments
No Comments