20 Memorial Day Salad Recipes to Balance Out All That Meat

You're going to need something bright and fresh—or at least something cool—to cut through all those smoky meats.

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The Serious Eats Team
The Serious Eats Team
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Updated May 24, 2024
Coleslaw in a white bowl with serving utensils

Serious Eats / Liz Clayman

Memorial Day is right around the corner, and that means grilling season is officially here. Your holiday cookout preparations are probably focused on burgers, skewers, and other grilled mains, but don't forget about the side dishes. Though salads might seem unexciting next to a gorgeously seared steak, they serve the vital purpose of rounding out and brightening up what can be an otherwise heavy meal.

We have lots of options to choose from, including updated potato salads, pasta salads, and coleslaws; more vegetable-forward dishes to keep it light; and even a few grilled salads. Keep reading for 20 of our favorite salads that are perfect for a Memorial Day cookout.

  • Classic Potato Salad

    Classic potato salad in a blue bowl with serving utensils

    Serious Eats / Eric Kleinberg

    The best classic potato salad starts with the best potatoes. Dump a bunch of chopped spuds into boiling water, and they'll come out crunchy at the center and mushy on the outside—definitely not what you want from potato salad. Our trick is to start the potatoes in cold water so that they cook evenly. The dressing you use is largely a matter of taste, but we like a balanced mixture of mayo, rice wine vinegar, sugar, mustard, and chopped cornichons.

  • Easy Fingerling Potato Salad With Creamy Dill Dressing

    Multi-colored fingerling potato salad in a square glass bowl with serving utensil

    Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

    This recipe starts in the same way as our classic potato salad, with cooking the spuds in cold water seasoned with salt and vinegar. We make the dressing with tangy sour cream instead of mayonnaise for extra flavor, and add olive oil, vinegar, onion, and a generous amount of dill. Creamy fingerling potatoes are our favorite choice here, but Yukon Golds will work, too.

  • Fingerling Potato Salad With Chorizo, Onion, and Arugula

    Fingerling potato salad with arugula, chorizo, and onion in a blue bowl with serving spoon

    Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

    This potato salad is neither creamy nor vegan. The oil-dressed salad is studded with smoky chorizo, both pickled and sautéed onion, and peppery arugula. For extra flavor, we cook the potatoes in ultra-salty water and add aromatics like bay leaves and oregano to the pot.

  • Japanese Potato Salad With Cucumbers, Carrots, and Red Onion

    A white ceramic bowl holding Japanese potato salad.

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

    Japanese potato salad doesn't look much like its American cousin, but it'll still be a hit at your Memorial Day cookout. The biggest difference is that the potatoes are mashed after boiling and packed with mix-ins; in this case, we use cucumber, carrots, red onion, hard-boiled egg, and scallions. The dressing is pretty similar to what you see on American potato salads—mayo, vinegar, and mustard—but we use Japanese-style Kewpie mayo and powdered hot mustard.

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  • Simple Grilled-Potato Salad With Grilled-Lemon Vinaigrette

    Grilled potato salad in a white bowl with serving utensil

    Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

    Once you start grilling your potatoes for potato salad, you may never want to go back to your standard recipe. This dairy-free version is made with new potatoes par-cooked on the stove, grilled until crispy, and dressed with a lemony vinaigrette. Grilling the lemons softens their tart flavor and gives the dressing an additional hint of smoke.

  • Creamy Vegan Fingerling Potato Salad

    Creamy vegan potato salad on a white platter

    Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

    This potato salad manages to be super creamy without requiring a drop of mayonnaise—in fact, it's 100% vegan. Instead of making a standard potato salad dressing with vegan mayo, we use a sweet-tart vinaigrette thickened with starch-rich potato-cooking liquid and mashed Yukon Golds.

  • Classic Coleslaw

    Classic coleslaw in a white bowl with serving utensils

    Serious Eats / Liz Clayman

    Simply slicing raw cabbage and tossing it with dressing is a recipe for disaster—not only does the cabbage come out unpleasantly crunchy, it also ends up shedding a ton of water that will turn your coleslaw into soup. The solution is to purge the cabbage (and other vegetables) with salt and sugar after shredding, which softens them, draws out excess water, and concentrates their flavor. After the cabbage has dried, it's ready to dress with a simple 3:1 mixture of mayo and apple cider vinegar, plus a bit of sharp Dijon mustard for extra flavor.

  • Tangy Buttermilk Coleslaw

    Buttermilk coleslaw in a ceramic bowl with serving utensil

    Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

    If you're always ending up with a lot of leftover buttermilk after using just a few ounces for a recipe, this is a handy way to use up the rest. We start this coleslaw just as in the recipe above, thinly slicing the vegetables (a mandoline works, but a food processor is faster) and purging them of excess moisture. The dressing is made with lots of tangy buttermilk, plus mayo, mustard, apple cider vinegar, and sugar.

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  • Tangy and Creamy Macaroni Salad

    Creamy macaroni salad in beige serving bowl

    Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

    Too much macaroni salad out there is dressed with little more than mayonnaise, which can be bland and unappealing, even for a mayo lover. This recipe gives the dressing a more complex flavor by mixing the mayo with sour cream, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire, and hot sauce. It also adds celery, shallots, and scallions to give the dish plenty of crunch, thereby avoiding the all-too-common one-note texture.

  • Spanish Pasta Salad With Chorizo, Piquillo Peppers, and Pickled Onion

    Spanish pasta salad with chorizo, piquillo peppers, and onion in blue bowl

    Serious Eats / Daniel Gritzer

    Looking for a more refined alternative to a typical pasta salad? This Spanish-inspired version is sauced with smoky Spanish chorizo, tart pickled yellow onion, and piquillo peppers. We normally like to cook our pasta al dente, but not for pasta salad—the noodles firm up as they cool, so you need to cook them a little longer to compensate.

  • Blistered-Tomato Pasta Salad With Basil

    Pasta salad with blistered tomatoes and basil leaves in a white bowl

    Serious Eats / Daniel Gritzer

    It's common to make summertime pasta salads with raw tomatoes and basil, and while we love that flavor combination, we take issue with the technique—pasta and raw vegetables just don't work well together. Instead, we cook cherry tomatoes until they burst and use their juices to make a simple sauce, while keeping the basil raw to maintain its fresh, spicy flavor. This salad can be made a day in advance, but make sure not to add the basil until right before serving.

  • Roman-Inspired Mixed-Green Salad (Misticanza alla Romana)

    Mixed greens salad plated with fork on the side

    Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

    Though this salad is about as simple and modest as they come—mixed greens, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt—it'll stand out if you use only the freshest leafy greens and herbs that you can find at the market. Look especially for greens that are in season, which, right now, means tender leaves like arugula, watercress, and pea shoots. It doesn't sound like much, but there's no better way to cut through all the heavy grilled mains and sides at a cookout.

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  • Classic Caprese Salad

    An oval ceramic platter holding caprese salad.

    Serious Eats / Julia Estrada

    It's just not summer without Caprese salad, and a good one is all about the quality of the ingredients. Though fresh tomatoes won't hit their peak till August and September, if you're really craving a Caprese now, look for smaller cherry and grape tomatoes, which tend to be far higher in quality than full-size tomatoes during the off season. This is also the time to hunt down the best fresh mozzarella available to you, reach for the top-shelf olive oil, and break out the fancy coarse sea salt. The result will be so good, you wouldn't dream of letting a bottle of balsamic vinegar near it—right?

  • Catalonian-Inspired Grilled Vegetable Salad (Xató)

    Xató grilled endive and spring onions with romesco-like dressing

    Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

    This salad makes double use of your fire: We grill chiles, tomato, almonds, hazelnuts, and bread and blend them up to make a vinegary romesco-like sauce, then serve that sauce on grilled endive and spring onions. Anchovies are a traditional xató ingredient, but since they can be polarizing, we recommend setting some out on the side and letting others decide whether or not to add them.

  • Bean Salad With Radicchio, Radish, Pickled Onions, and Marcona Almonds

    Bean salad with radicchio, radish, pickled onion, and Marcona almonds in a ceramic bowl

    Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

    Like all salads, bean salads are best when they're packed with contrasting textures and flavors. Here, that means crunchy radishes and Marcona almonds, bitter radicchio, and acidic pickled red onion, all dressed with a simple vinaigrette. We used orca beans in this version of the dish, but feel free to use turtle beans, navy beans, black-eyed peas, or whatever else you happen to have in your pantry.

  • Summer Squash Salad With Goat Cheese, Fennel, and Dill

    Salad of thin sliced summer squash and fennel, crumbled goat cheese, and dill in a turquoise serving bowl

    Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

    This easy salad showcases young, tender summer squash, which we slice thinly on a mandoline and toss with fennel, dill, olive oil, lemon juice, and goat cheese. Toss everything together thoroughly except the cheese, and be gentle once it goes in—you want the cheese to stay in clumps, rather than dissolving in a milky coating.

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  • Watermelon, Feta, and Mint Salad

    Watermelon, feta, and mint salad in a bowl on a colorful tropical print napkin
    Serious Eats / Liz Voltz

    Watermelon and feta salads became so trendy in the aughts that they eventually suffered a backlash. The fervor over them may have died down, but the combination of sweet fruit and salty cheese is as delicious as ever. Beyond those two ingredients, we like to add chopped mint leaves, olive oil, and a little minced lemon zest. As with our squash salad, we add the cheese last, and crumble it over the top, so it doesn't end up coating the watermelon and dominating the whole dish.

  • Italian-American Pasta Salad

    Italian pasta salad on a white platter with fork

    Serious Eats / Greg Dupree

    For a stellar pasta salad, skip the vinaigrette and opt for punchy, briny ingredients like capers and olives. Using concave pasta shapes like shells or orecchiette allows each bite to be filled with vegetables, cheese, and cured meat for maximum flavor and texture. 

  • Creamy Cucumber Salad

    Creamy cucumber salad on a bright teal patterned platter with serving utensils

    Serious Eats / Lynn Wolsted

    In this simple salad, we salt and drain the cucumbers to get rid of excess moisture without sacrificing crunch. Whisking a small amount of water into a mixture of tahini and lemon juice helps create a smooth sauce, while the brightness of fresh dill balances the nutty richness of tahini.

  • The Best Caesar Salad

    A composed caesar salad in a ceramic bowl on a white stone background.

    Serious Eats / Diana Chistruga

    What's more of a crowd pleaser than a classic Caesar salad? In addition to crisp romaine lettuce and crunchy croutons, you can add a little or a lot of anchovies to the dressing to suit your tastes. An emulsified dressing evenly coats the lettuce for better flavor in each bite.

May 2018

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