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Italian Chopped Salad is romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, salami, provolone cheese, shaved parmesan cheese all chopped to bite size pieces added to a bowl, tossed in a sweet and tangy homemade Italian dressing and topped with crunchy salted roasted chickpeas. The serving size is either one giant salad for one person or two decent size salads for two people. The best thing about chopped salads is everything is cut down to roughly the same size to make eating it easy. The last thing I want to do is carve a salad like it’s Thanksgiving when I’m starving. This is why I NEVER order wedge salads.
A local restaurant to me named Bru Burger used to have this salad on their menu. I’ll never understand why they took it off, but this reminds me of it. The recipe is forgiving and anything can be added to it. The only meat is salami, but adding Old World pepperoni would amazing. You could even do deli meats like honey ham or turkey. That’s technically not Italian, but this is your salad, and you can do whatever you want. The restaurant added salted roasted chickpeas which adds so much interesting flavor and texture. My local grocery store only had one brand named Biena which can also be ordered on Amazon here. I highly recommend not leaving those out.
The dressing for the Italian chopped salad is an adaptation from an Italian dressing from ambition kitchen. It’s tangy, sweet and delicious. It sort of reminds of me of the delicious dressing used in marinated tomatoes recipe. All very common ingredients you find in Italian dressing all of which are probably in your kitchen right now. It has garlic, red wine vinegar, light olive oil, Dijon mustard, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning and a sweetener. I chose to add stevia, but the original recipe calls for a teaspoon of sugar or honey (based on preference). The garlic needs to be finely minced. Not chopped or grated. You don’t want big pieces of raw garlic in your salad, nor do you want it to be so intense that the flavor overpowers everything else. This is when preparation does truly matter. Just finely mince it for this.
Italian Chopped Salad
Ingredients
- 1 head romaine lettuce
- 1 slice Provolone Cheese diced
- 3 tbsp shaved parmesan cheese
- 1/4 c cherry tomatoes quartered
- 4 slices old world salami sliced
- 1/4 c roasted salted chickpeas
Salad Dressing (only need half for the salad)
- 1/3 c light olive oil
- 3 tbsp red wine vinegar
- 1 clove garlic finely minced
- 1 packet stevia
- 1 tsp Dijon mustard rounded
- 1 tsp Italian seasoning
- 1/2 tsp kosher salt
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
Instructions
- Add all the dressing ingredients to a bowl, saving olive oil for last. Whisk the olive oil in until it emulsifies. This will take about 2 minutes. Set aside.
- Wash and chop one head of romaine lettuce into bite size cuts. Add to a bowl.
- Wash and cut cherry tomatoes and add to the bowl along with cheeses.
- Lay 4 large old world salami pieces on top of each other, roll up and cut strips. Pull apart and add to the bowl.
- Finally add the roasted chickpeas and dressing, toss and immediately eat.