You will love this easy recipe for a delicious chicken Cobb salad served with a simple homemade vinaigrette.
A favorite restaurant meal that you can easily recreate at home, this tasty and filling salad is ready in about 30 minutes.
I love main-course salads. They are tasty, fresh, and filling. I often make Thai chicken salad, Chinese chicken salad, taco salad, and turkey salad.
Chicken Cobb salad is one of my favorite lunches to order at restaurants. It’s so wonderfully varied and flavorful. And it’s filling too! I was surprised to learn how easy it is to make this salad at home.
Ingredients
Here’s an overview of the ingredients needed to make this salad. The exact measurements are listed in the recipe card below.
- For the dressing: Olive oil, vinegar, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, salt and pepper, and garlic powder.
- Sliced hard-boiled eggs: Sometimes, I slightly undercook them, so they’re not exactly soft-boiled eggs but actually medium-boiled eggs. The yolks are not liquid but soft. Yum.
- Crispy bacon, chopped: Even if you usually like your bacon chewy, it’s best to make sure it’s crispy for this recipe. You can pan-fry your bacon, make microwave bacon, or cook your bacon in the oven.
- Cooked chicken breast, sliced: I use baked chicken breast, grilled chicken breast, or broiled chicken breast. Sometimes, I use leftover Cajun chicken. You can also use rotisserie chicken and slice or cube it. Just make sure to remove the skin. Cold chicken skin is rubbery.
- Vegetables: Salad greens (or baby spinach leaves) and sliced cherry tomatoes (or use regular tomatoes and cube or slice them.)
- Sliced avocado: I’m a big fan of the creamy Haas avocado. Other varieties are often too fibrous and watery.
- Crumbled cheese: Blue cheese is classic, but I’ve used goat cheese or feta, and both were excellent.
Variations
The classic chicken Cobb salad is made with chopped greens, tomatoes, crisp bacon, chicken breast, hard-boiled eggs, avocado, chives, Roquefort cheese, and red wine vinaigrette.
But like all salads, it’s a flexible recipe with countless versions. Here are a few ideas for varying the classic recipe:
- I often use spinach leaves instead of salad greens.
- Change up the cheese you use. I love using gorgonzola or stilton as my blue cheese, but you can use any number of crumbled cheeses, including goat cheese and feta. You can even use slices of grilled halloumi cheese.
- Use cubed deli ham instead of crumbled bacon.
- Use your favorite salad dressing. Good options include ranch dressing and blue cheese dressing. A mustard dressing is also good in this recipe.
Instructions
Despite its complexity, making this salad isn’t difficult, especially if you prep some of the ingredients ahead of time. Scroll down to the recipe card for detailed instructions. Here are the basic steps:
You start by whisking the dressing ingredients until they emulsify into a smooth, velvety salad dressing.
Next, arrange the salad greens on a large serving platter.
Arrange the remaining ingredients on top of the greens. You can pretty much arrange them in any order you like. I usually add them in the following order: chicken, tomatoes, avocado, eggs, bacon, and blue cheese.
The last step is drizzling the dressing on the salad and serving.
Expert Tip
This salad contains quite a few ingredients. And you need to pre-cook chicken, bacon, and hard-boiled eggs to make it.
So, I keep things simple by preparing these ingredients the day before and refrigerating them. They need to be cold anyway. The next day, assembling the salad is a breeze!
Serving Suggestions
The presentation is really important here, as you can see in the photos. It’s such a gorgeous salad! So it’s best to serve it as shown rather than mixed.
You can drizzle half the dressing over the greens and the remaining half over the other ingredients.
Or you can arrange the salad first, present it at the table without the dressing, then pour everything into a large bowl, add the dressing, and mix.
The perfect drink to go with this salad? A refreshing glass of cucumber water!
Storing Leftovers
Storing Leftovers
The salad greens will become soggy if stored, and the avocado might turn brown, so I don’t keep those. But the rest of the salad keeps fine in the fridge, in an airtight container, for 2-3 days.
