22 Salad Recipes Guaranteed to Improve Your Next Barbeque or Picnic

Salads might just be the perfect picnic food: by their very nature they tend to be thrown together, meaning it doesn’t matter if they get tossed around a bit on the journey. And the fact that they are light, bright and full of amazing produce makes them ideally suited for eating al fresco.

Cold pasta, cold rice, freekeh, chopped nuts, potatoes, beans, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, broccoli – the only real limit is your imagination when it comes to salads. And that’s before thinking about dressings such as olive oil, red wine vinegar, fish sauce, lemon juice and mayo.

A good salad is refreshing and brings balance to what may otherwise be a picnic heavy on cured meats, supermarket dips and slightly sweaty cheeses. But that doesn’t have to mean a token bowl of leaves drizzled with olive oil (though that can be great too). As these 22 recipes illustrate, salads can be filling and satisfying in their own right.

“The fresh aniseed flavours of the tarragon bounce around like an electric guitar solo in a ’90s rock power ballad,” says Pipis Kiosk executive chef and co-owner Jordan Clay of this lively tomato salad. The key to salad success here is using a variety of tomatoes – even early-season toms will work, with the sweet cherry dressing and creamy whipped tofu counterbalancing their tartness.

There’s tomato salad. And then there’s tomato salad by Stephanie Alexander, one of the most celebrated cooks and authors this country has ever produced. Sure, it only includes five ingredients – including salt and pepper – but there’s some good advice here on how to make it really, truly sing, plus four optional add-ons (we’re adding them all).

Matty Matheson’s turn as a handyman on The Bear has propelled him from cult fame to proper stardom – but the Canadian chef’s talents are still geared more towards pots and pans than pipes, as proven by this very, very garlicky caesar salad recipe. “If your caesar salad dressing doesn’t burn your tongue, it’s not good, and that’s a fact,” writes Matheson.

With her books Community and Neighbourhood, Hetty McKinnon proved to be something of a vegetable whisperer, blending flavours and ingredients from across the globe with serious aplomb. This fresh, crunchy number shows just why she’s a bestselling author. It’s ready in less than 15 minutes, perfect for sharing and every forkful is a flavour bomb.

The potato salads of Germany’s Bavarian and Swabian regions have informed this potato salad by vegetable doyen Yotam Ottolenghi. It forgos mayo, instead earning its creaminess from the slow release of potato starch into a broth. An extra salty kick, from crispy pancetta, is a non-traditional touch that serves to amp up the flavour.

This refreshing salad recipe comes from one of Melbourne’s best falafel shops. It only uses eight ingredients, but each adds a different dimension. You get crunch from the celery, radishes and broad beans, and freshness from the mint. Lemon adds zest, spring onions some bite, and salt helps balance it all out.

Look, blue cheese isn’t for everyone. And neither is the bitter radicchio, if we’re being totally honest. But if you’re eating with a group of people you know will appreciate something more than iceberg and tomatoes, this one from the bestselling author of Ostro and A Year of Simple Family Food is likely to be a winner.

Lightly fried cauliflower, yoghurt, soft herbs, currants and crisp pita come together in this salad, which is a textural joy and so hearty it could be a whole meal in itself. Inspired by the vibrant vegetable dishes found around the Middle East, it’s ideal as a midweek lunch, a side for a dinner party or an impressive addition to your next picnic.

Brett and Alison Hutley, the owners of Brisbane’s Botanica cafe, have been tossing together salads since 2013 for those both hungry and in a hurry. This particular number is designed for summer, but with three ingredients and just 15 minutes of preparation required, it makes a simple, delicious meal or side dish all year round.

Starring both raw and cooked cauliflower, this big and bold salad by US chef Molly Baz has plenty of nooks and crannies for its creamy vegan ranch dressing to hide in. “This dish is simply never not thriving,” writes Baz.

Freekeh, or roasted green durum wheat, is an ancient grain popular across the entire Mediterranean, from the Iberian Peninsula to North Africa and the Middle East. It’s easy to find at major supermarkets and lends a taut, nutty backbone to this salad of broccoli, almonds, red onion and pomegranate. A trio of herbs – mint, parsley and dill – bring some freshness to the palate, making this a slam-dunk for hot summer nights.

Spring and summer are the best time of year to make this Italian-ish salad from former fine dining chef Liam Driscoll. That’s when zucchini and sugar snaps are in season, and their freshness will burst right in your mouth. Mint, lemon, macadamias and a generous dusting of cheese add salty, zingy, nutty, umami characters, making this something of an all-rounder.

American Danielle Alvarez, the former head chef at Sydney restaurant Fred’s, came direct from four years at Alice Waters’ famous Chez Panisse, an early proponent of farm-to-table cooking and veg-driven “California cuisine” – a background reflected in this textural salad of squishy sultanas, brittle dried rice and pistachios, finished with a sweet curry vinaigrette. “It’s all about different levels of crunch,” Alvarez says.

Whole-egg mayo, fatty bacon and starchy, carb-y potatoes – trust the Germans to bring us such a defiantly stodgy take on salad. If you find the whole thing a bit heavy, have a crack at this recipe, which adds sweet-and-sour gherkins, plus their juice. The pickles’ sharp, vinegary acidity punches through all that richness and keeps you coming back for bite after bite.

This Baby baby started life as a side dish at the Melbourne restaurant but soon got promoted to mains when people kept ordering it on its own. Easy to scale up for 12, 18 or even 30 people, it pairs the relatively plain savoy cabbage with peas, radish, parmesan, mint and a small touch of chilli. With garlick-y, mustard-y dressing, the cabbage becomes a crunchy vehicle for a whole range of flavours.

This herb-loaded salad from Almay Jordaan, the chef and co-owner of Melbourne’s Neighbourhood Wine and Old Palm Liquor, is a pretty side dish for your next dinner party, picnic or barbeque. Bright with herbs and young peas, it really comes into its own once the weather gets warmer.

If you’re firing up the barbie to cook meat, you may as well use it to make salad too. This original panzanella includes charred tomatoes and chillies for a wonderfully smoky flavour. Apart from the croutons, which spend 10 minutes in the oven, the entire thing can be assembled outside, by the barbeque, preferably with a cooling beer or rosé in hand.

This recipe also relies on the barbeque, using it to transform regular asparagus into something deeper and more savoury. Add cooling cucumber, pickled ginger, aromatic lemongrass and sweet/salty/sour/spicy nam jim and you’ve got a quick, hot day hero. We can see why this salad is so popular at its home restaurant in Melbourne.

Cooked farro (a type of dried wheat similar to freekeh) forms the nutty bedrock of this satisfying yet refreshing dish from Bondi Beach icon Icebergs. Basil, mint, cucumber, celery and cold peas all play the foil, adding freshness and vibrancy, while a generous cap of grated of ricotta salata gives every bite a salty, savoury finish.

The potato isn’t readily associated with China, but in Sichuan, a province renowned for its spicy food and brutal winters, it’s the star ingredient of this unique salad. To Western palates the texture feels a little odd at first, as the potatoes are only blanched for a couple of minutes and retain a fresh, crunchy bite, not unlike a spongier raw carrot. But get used to that and you’ll come to appreciate the punchy, refreshing and downright distinctive character on show here, courtesy of garlic, soy, Chinkiang vinegar, chilli and sesame oil.

“I went to Beijing once and had this dish of stir-fried potato with Sichuan pepper and ginger,” chef Pasi Petänen told us when we collected this recipe for The Broadsheet Italian Cookbook. He’s referring, of course, to something much like Rosheen Kaul’s recipe above. Petänen fell for the texture – he calls it “al dente potato” – and later came up with the idea to season it with classic cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper) flavour. The result is original and delicious as they come.

A similar salad to this one went viral in 2022 because Jennifer Aniston supposedly ate it. Whether or not that’s true is irrelevant: all you need to know is this melange is a textural bonanza of crunchy nuts, soft feta, smooth chickpeas and creamy maple and tahini dressing.