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10 Easy Summer Salads for Every Occasion

2 years ago
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Savor the goodness of a Chicken, Bacon & Broccolini Salad, complete with a creamy blue cheese dressing. Grilled chicken and crispy bacon provide a protein-packed punch, while the vibrant broccolini adds freshness and crunch. Topped with the indulgent tang of blue cheese dressing, this salad is a tantalizing treat that guarantees a burst of flavors in every forkful."

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10 Easy Summer Salads for Every Occasion

These ten easy summer salads are proof that salad, done properly, is never an afterthought. From my Brown Rice Tabbouleh to a Thai Crispy Skin Duck Noodle Salad, there’s something here for every occasion, every appetite, and every long, hot Adelaide summer evening.

11 Easy Summer Salads

The Girl Who Made the Salad

I have always loved salad. Genuinely, deeply, possibly to a degree that would have surprised my teenage self if she’d known it would become this consistent. Growing up in south western Sydney in the nineties, we were always the home that hosted. Big backyard barbecues for anyone and everyone, neighbours, friends, family, whoever showed up. It was the kind of house where the back door was always open and there was always enough food, and I loved that about it. And my role, without question, was the salad.

Back then salads were humble things. Iceberg lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrot, a handful of cheese, and that was about the sum of it. But even then I cared about doing it properly. Everything had to be chopped just right, dressed perfectly, every element in the right proportion so that each forkful was the ideal bite. I took it seriously in the way that only a teenager who has found their thing takes something seriously. My mum would let me get on with it, and I would, completely absorbed in making something that most people would have thrown together in five minutes actually feel considered.

I even remember the boy I had a crush on at the time, Francis, one of my brother’s closest friends, telling me how amazing my salad was. Was he flirting? Absolutely. We ended up dating briefly a few years later, after my brother had moved overseas and the friend group had shuffled around the way friend groups do. But I still remember how proud I was of those salads, long before I had any real vocabulary for what I was doing or why. That instinct, the one that wanted every bite to be the perfect bite, never went anywhere. It just got better ingredients to work with.

Salads Grown Up

Living in Australia, salads are less of a side dish and more of a way of life, particularly through the summer months when the heat makes anything heavy feel like a very bad idea. Adelaide does summer with a particular intensity, that dry, relentless heat that hits you the moment you step outside, and the produce here is extraordinary. Stone fruits, tomatoes, fresh herbs, vegetables with an actual flavour to them, the kind that make you understand why people get so passionate about provenance. It makes salad-making feel like a completely different exercise to what I was doing with that iceberg lettuce in the nineties.

My salads have grown up considerably since those early backyard efforts. Tabbouleh made with brown rice instead of bulgur wheat. Noodle salads built around lemongrass kangaroo or crispy skin duck. A Shirazi salad that is so simple it barely needs a recipe and so good it barely needs anything else on the table. Lamb with feta, mint with feta, Mediterranean with lamb again because lamb and the Mediterranean just belong together and I will not be arguing otherwise. The range of what a salad can be has expanded in ways my teenage self, carefully slicing that iceberg lettuce, could never have imagined.

The through-line is still the same instinct, though. Everything in the right proportion, dressed properly, every element chosen for a reason and not just thrown in because it happened to be in the fridge. The salads have just caught up with what I always knew they could be, and honestly I think that teenage girl would be pretty pleased with where things ended up.

Adelaide in a Bowl

There is something very specific about an Adelaide summer that makes you want to eat well. The heat is dry and relentless, the evenings are long and golden, and the Adelaide Hills produce some of the most beautiful Sauvignon Blanc in the country. A cold glass of that, a generous bowl of something fresh and bright and full of flavour, and a little bit of late afternoon sun filtering through the window. That’s the brief these salads were built around, and I think it’s a pretty good one.

These ten recipes span a wide range of flavours and influences, because the best salad rotation has range. Something Middle Eastern, something with noodles, something with lamb, something light enough for a weekday lunch and substantial enough to anchor a dinner party spread. I’ve tried to build a list that covers all of it, drawing from the cuisines and flavour profiles that have shaped my cooking, from the kebab shops of south western Sydney to the Middle Eastern pantry staples that have followed me through every city I’ve lived in.

Pour yourself something cold, pick a recipe, and let the salad era begin. Or continue, if you’re anything like me and it never really ended.

The Recipes

Brown Rice Tabbouleh My version of a recipe I grew up eating, made with brown rice instead of bulgur wheat and packed with fresh herbs, tomato, and a sharp lemony dressing. People have been asking for this recipe for years, and I stand by it completely.

Chicken, Bacon and Broccolini Salad Substantial enough to be a full meal, bright enough to feel like a salad. The broccolini holds its own against the smoky bacon and the chicken, and the whole thing comes together quickly.

Gnocchi Caprese Salad Pan-fried gnocchi tossed through a classic caprese of fresh tomato, mozzarella, and basil, with a drizzle of good olive oil and a little balsamic. It’s the salad that can’t quite decide if it’s a salad or a pasta dish, and honestly that’s exactly why it works.

Lemongrass Kangaroo Noodle Salad This one is a proper showstopper. Kangaroo is lean, flavourful, and deeply Australian, and with lemongrass and rice noodles it becomes something genuinely unexpected and wonderful.

Lamb and Feta Salad Lamb and feta is one of those combinations that just works. This salad is bold and satisfying with enough freshness to feel like summer.

Rustic Tomato Salad with Crunchy Croutons A salad built for peak tomato season. The croutons add the kind of crunch and substance that turns a simple tomato salad into something worth writing home about.

Leafy Pink Salad with Feta Light, pretty, and a little bit unexpected. The kind of salad that looks beautiful on a table and disappears quickly.

Thai Crispy Skin Duck Noodle Salad The most ambitious recipe on this list, and worth every bit of the effort. Crispy skin duck with rice noodles, fresh herbs, and a punchy Thai dressing. An absolute dinner party weapon.

Mint and Feta Salad Deceptively simple and quietly brilliant. Mint and feta together with a good olive oil and a squeeze of lemon is one of those combinations that tastes like it shouldn’t work as well as it does.

Chicken Taco Salad All the flavours of taco night in a bowl, without the shell. Seasoned chicken, black beans, corn, tomato, and avocado over crispy lettuce with a zingy dressing that ties it all together. Fun, filling, and genuinely crowd-pleasing.

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Bry is the food writer and recipe developer behind Cooking with Bry, a recipe platform built on nearly thirty years of cooking experience and over 215 original recipes spanning classic Australian, British, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine. She grew up in Western Sydney, where food was never just food. It was Aussie barbecues in the backyard, Middle Eastern bakeries down the road, and Mediterranean kitchens that treated every meal like an occasion. That early, immersive exposure to bold and diverse flavours shaped her palate and her cooking instincts in ways that underpin every recipe she develops today. She spent seven years living in the UK across London and Glasgow, deepening her understanding of British comfort food and traditional European cooking before returning to Australia via Adelaide, the country's undisputed foodie capital, where a passion for exceptional produce and honest, ingredient-led cooking only grew stronger. She's now based in Brisbane, developing and testing all of her recipes from her home kitchen. All of that, Western Sydney, the UK, Adelaide, Brisbane, and everywhere in between, feeds directly into what she cooks and how she writes about it. Her recipes pull from the traditions she knows most deeply, the food that feels like home, and are developed with the home cook firmly in mind. Honest, unfussy, and built around flavours that actually work.
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