Peach Mint Salad with Lemon Dressing

This peach mint salad has just a few ingredients for a fresh easy, summer appetizer or entree. It is topped with a lemon salad dressing that mixes up in less than 5 minutes.

I have several other salad dressing recipes that will pair well with this salad, including my balsamic citrus vinaigrette and my traditional vinaigrette recipe with lots of info on how to make a vinaigrette.

Salad Ingredients

Greens – Almost any leafy green will work well as the base for this salad. But with sweet and tart elements, a peppery green like arugula or a slightly bitter one like escarole or frisée adds another layer of flavor. Romaine, green leaf, red leaf or butter lettuce are great options if you want a more mild flavored lettuce.

Fresh summer peaches work best in this salad. Frozen peaches tend to get too mushy. Cut them any way you please whether you like them diced so that they are evenly distributed in the salad or sliced for a pretty presentation, anything will work.

Fresh mint leaves – Fresh mint adds a wonderful sweet, slightly pungent pop to this salad. It’s a great flavor partner to peaches and lemon.

Mint is a delicate herb that oxidizes and wilts quickly, so I keep the mint leaves whole. If you are making the salad ahead of time, I recommend putting the mint on at the last minute to be sure it looks fresh.

Cucumber is my favorite salad ingredient, with Persian cucumbers being the ultimate. The cucumber can be sliced, diced or shaved depending on how you want to present your salad.

Toasted almonds add some crunchy texture to the salad. Also, peaches and almonds are closely related cousins so they go together well in just about any recipe.

If you are nut-free, toasted sunflower seeds or toasted pumpkin seeds are an excellent substitute.

Another balance to the sweet peaches is green onion. I prefer the mild flavor of green onion but if you are a fan of more pungent red, yellow or brown onions, feel free to sub one of those in.

Lemon Dressing

Lemon is such a perfect flavor partner to almost any sweet fruit and sweet and tart is a classic combination. In addition, lemon and mint are simply sublime together.

This dressing is much like a vinaigrette except that it doesn’t have vinegar. Lemon is the tart element instead. I highly recommend using fresh squeezed lemon juice. I find that the bottled lemon juices can’t match fresh squeezed.

Here are the other ingredients:

Extra virgin olive oil is my preferred oil for salad dressings. This California Olive Ranch Global Blend is an excellent olive oil for salad dressings. It has a mild flavor that goes nicely with lemon juice.

A little bit of Dijon mustard helps to emulsify the dressing.

For a quick and easy savory onion flavor I use granulated onion (or onion powder). Finely chopped shallot is an excellent sub If you want to use a fresh ingredient.

A sweet ingredient like agave or honey helps to balance the sour lemon juice and slightly bitter mustard and olive oil. The recipe below calls for 2-3 teaspoons. If you like your dressing more acidic, go for the lower amount, more sweet, use 3 tsp. And feel free to play with the flavor balance to suit you taste preference.

Blender Salad Dressing

For the quickest salad dressing ever, you can use the blender to mix it up. It’s a great way to get the lemon and oil to emulsify better than if you mix by hand and it creates a creamier texture.

SImply add all of the ingredients except the oil into the blender and mix on high for 10-15 seconds. Add the oil and mix again. That’s it!

How Much Dressing?

So one of the ultimate questions is, how much salad dressing should you put on a salad? There are some straightforward answers, but my best answer is however much dressing you like! I personally like my salads a little heavy on the dressing. I always ask for extra dressing when I order salad at a restaurant.

If you want a general rule of thumb, an appetizer sized salad uses about two tablespoons (1 ounce) of dressing. The recipe below makes a about 7 ounces of dressing and serves six. This is a little bit more than two tablespoons per serving.

I think the best way to handle it, is to serve the salad undressed and have a bottle of dressing on the table for everyone to decide how much they want.

Salad Variations and Extras

I kept the list of ingredients in the salad rather short. The salad has something sweet, sour, crunchy, soft, creamy which is an excellent combination.

However if you want to add even more, here are a few other ingredients that go well in this salad:

• Crumbled feta and/or chicken can turn this into a entrée salad. The feta goes extremely well with sweet fruit, mint and lemon.
• If you want to keep this salad vegan but add a little something extra, garbanzo beans and quinoa are my favorite toppings
• Diced avocado adds another rich and creamy ingredient to this salad and makes it even more satisfying.
• Top with my homemade gluten-free baguette croutons.