The Perfect Spring Salad with Green Goddess Dressing

This spring salad with green goddess dressing is an absolute must-make once the weather starts warming up outside! It’s made with your favorite tender salad greens, sugar snap peas, thinly sliced radishes, creamy avocado, green onions, chopped pistachios, and freshly snipped chives. Topped and tossed with an ultra creamy (herby!) green goddess dressing for absolute spring salad PERFECTION!

The most vibrant and texture-filled spring salad!

Making salads that march to the tune of seasonal produce is for sure one of my love languages.

Finding the right combination of the best of what’s in the produce department for a salad is an absolutely exquisite experience when you get the formula right!

I’m always looking to include various textures – a lot of crunch, a little bit of something creamy, with the right amount of complementary flavors.

And this spring salad is FULL of texture. Bright and snappy ingredients like sugar snap peas, radishes, avocado, green onions, pistachios, and fresh chives get the salad party started in just the right way.

And this dressing! It’s our current salad dressing obsession. Herby Dairy Free Green Goddess Dressing is super creamy, but still bright and light thanks to the generous inclusion of fresh herbs, punchy garlic, zippy lemon juice, and briny capers. BIG SWOON!

Any type of salad green that you like will work here. I love using a combination of butter lettuce leaves and arugula, but a spring salad mix or chopped romaine would also be a beautiful backdrop for the other ingredients.

It’s also a salad that’s totally open to a few customization based on what catches your eye at the store. Lightly blanched asparagus, goat cheese, or another type of chopped nut or seed would all be excellent substitutions or additions.

If you love a big and boasty salad as much as we do here at NK, be sure to check out our entire library of salad recipes!

Ingredient highlights

Through my experience in recipe development, I always find that the main things to think about when assembling a stand-out salad are: including lots of texture, and highlighting fresh flavors with the best produce and ingredients you can find. This salad does all of that in the best possible way!

Fresh salad greens

Anything from butter lettuce to arugula to spring greens work well here. The peppery bite of arugula bring a lovely contrast to some of the richer components in the dish like the avocado and Creamy Green Goddess Dressing.

Crunchy veggies

Sugar snap peas and radishes provide most of the crisp veggie component for this salad. If you’re leaving one of them out be sure to add something in their place to fill that space in the ingredient list!

Chopped pistachios

I think that pistachios are a natural pairing for all-food-things-spring. We always keep the raw (unroasted) shelled pistachios from Trader Joe’s stocked in our pantry for salads like this.

Fresh herbs

Using fresh herbs is such an underrated addition to salad! Fresh chives are perfect for this spring salad, but parsley could be used instead. They also help bring out the herbaceous notes of the dressing!

Avocado

Creamy avocado helps bring the salad together and soften up some of the crunchier textures of the salad.

How to make the PERFECT spring salad

🌿 This no-cook spring salad comes together SO quickly once your ingredients are prepped and chopped. If you have any extra set of hands around to help chop you’ll be ready to dig in in no time! Feel free to cut the veggies however you like, but I think that thinly slicing the radishes and avocado, and cutting the sugar snap peas on a diagonal into bite sized pieces is absolute perfection.

The step-by-step

👉🏼 Once your dressing is made and the ingredients are prepped, layer all salad ingredients except the dressing in a large serving dish or bowl. Sprinkle salad ingredients with a generous pinch of kosher salt and black pepper.

👉🏼 Drizzle with about 1/3 a cup of dressing (or as much as desired), and gently toss to coat.

👉🏼 Finish with a little freshly cracked black pepper and a sprinkle of extra herbs if desired, serve immediately, and enjoy!

Dressing alternatives

I developed this recipe to pair perfectly with our 10-Minute Green Goddess Dressing (👋🏼 complementary flavors!), but you could use another favorite dressing instead.

This Dairy Free Ranch Dressing would be delicious, or a lighter vinaigrette would be yummy as well!

Serving suggestions

This salad makes a great side salad for whatever other yummy fare you have planned, but you can also enjoy it as more of an entree style salad!

If we’re making it a full meal, we love pairing it with our 30-Minute Baked Chicken Breast or Super Quick Pan Seared Shrimp.

If you enjoyed this spring salad we’d love it if you would take a moment to rate and review it below! 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 It’s also a good place for questions, and super helpful for other readers if you share any modifications you made to the recipe. 

Thank you for sharing your kitchen with NK. We’re so grateful you’re here!

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