Broccoli Salad Recipe

You'll love this broccoli salad – a great side dish for grilling out or to bring to a potluck!

Broccoli Salad Side Dish Recipe

It never fails that once the snow starts to melt I start craving side salads and a good ‘ol piece of meat on the charcoal grill. And this broccoli salad recipe is one of our family favorites. I love that it's full of nutrients and the kids are willing to eat it for the raisins and sunflower seeds – sometimes you have to meet in the middle, right?! This broccoli salad recipe is the first one to go on every salad bar that I've been at and the number one potluck side dish to disappear as well. And, I love that you could even turn this into a broccoli cauliflower salad recipe by substituting one of the broccoli bunches with a cauliflower bunch, or even some kale if you really wanted to and it would still be fantastic.

I have a couple of tricks to making my broccoli salad. My first tip is to chop one of the bunches of broccoli in your Ninja Blender or food processor. It gives a little more substance to the salad and makes it so that you don't just have big hunks of broccoli in the salad.

My second tip is to chop the second broccoli bunch with a chopper like this one here. This way you'll have small pieces and again, not too big of chunks.

Now, to get to making this delicious broccoli bacon salad.

First rinse your broccoli. I highly recommend doing a water and vinegar vegetable bath of about 1 cup of vinegar to the bowl of water. You'll be amazed at how much dirt you see in the bottom of your bowl when you take the broccoli out of the bowl.

Next, chop your broccoli. I mentioned that chopping one bunch of broccoli really well is the way to go. And to answer which part of the broccoli I use in my salad … if a broccoli bunch is like a tree, then I use the “stems” and the “leaves”. I toss the “trunks”.

Make the pieces smaller and throw the stems and leaves into your blender/food processor and press “chop”.

The second bunch of stems and leaves (using our same analogy) are chopped using a vegetable chopper to make bigger pieces.

You'll have a mixture like this:

P.S. Cutting the broccoli is the toughest part (I promise!) Now, gather your bacon, sunflower seeds, raisins and green onions.

Next you're going to make your dressing for the broccoli salad and pour the dressing mixture onto your broccoli salad:

Mix your salad together and you'll be enjoying this summer side salad favorite in no time!

Here is the final recipe that you can print (or just pin this recipe so you have it forever!)

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Broccoli Salad Recipe

Course Dinner

Prep Time 25 minutes

Total Time 25 minutes

Servings 6 cups salad

Author Kate

Ingredients

• 2 broccoli bunches chopped
• 3 green onion stems chopped
• 3/4 pound bacon baked and crumbled
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1/2 cup sunflower seeds
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup Hellman's mayo
• 2 T vinegar

Instructions

1. Combine first 5 ingredients
2. Combine sugar, mayo and vinegar and our over dry mixture and let sit atleast a couple hours before serving
3. Enjoy!