This is the type of salad that even a true salad hater will love. It’s PACKED with flavor and texture – quickly grilling the broccoli takes that raw edge off while still keeping it crunchy (and the charred bits add more flavor). Then it’s mixed with crispy bacon, crunchy toasted almonds and sunflower seeds, sweet dried cranberries, fresh scallions and creamy blue cheese to make a salad that feels more moreish than most.

There are lots of ways you can play around with the ingredients to suit your taste too – swap blue cheese for creamy feta (which I often do), use different nuts and seeds, swap the bacon for chorizo or crispy crumbled sausages (or skip it altogether).

It also keeps really well, so it’s an excellent choice for meal prep, or for taking along to parties and barbecues.

Ingredients

• Broccoli. I’m using a combination of broccolini and regular broccoli here, but you could use either. Broccolini tends to be a little more tender, but because we’re grilling it anyway, it doesn’t massively matter.
• Bacon. I’m using streaky bacon because we want that lovely bacon fat to add a layer of flavor to the salad, and I’d recommend going for bacon that’s not TOO lean for this reason. Always use free-range.
• Blue cheese. Use creamy blue cheese here (I’m using Castello Creamy Blue Cheese) because you want it to melt into the salad as you mix it, so it becomes a bit of a cheat dressing. Any blue cheese will do, but crumblier ones won’t mix cohesively into the salad (it’ll still taste glorious). If you don’t like blue cheese, creamy feta works wonderfully.
• Dried cranberries. These provide a pop of sweetness. You could also use raisins, sultanas, dried apricots or even fresh grapes, chopped into quarters.
• Toasted almonds and sunflower seeds. It’s called broccoli crunch salad for a reason, so there are lots of these lovely crunchy bits in it. You could use just toasted almonds, sunflower seeds, or another seed or nut mix – cashews, walnuts, pecans, macadamias or pumpkin seeds would work well.

How to make it

Slice the broccoli and broccolini into roughly bite-sized pieces – including the stems! Just chop off the ends and any very tough bits, but broccoli stems are perfectly edible and very tasty in this salad.

Toss them with olive oil and a little salt, then arrange them on a lined oven tray, ideally on one layer (don’t stress if they’re a little overlapping – you can see mine are). Pop them into the oven.

While the broccoli is in the oven, cook your bacon until it’s super crispy. Tip the bacon bits – plus the bacon fat – into a large mixing bowl. Once the broccoli is looking nice and charred, add that to the bowl too.

Add the chopped scallions, lemon juice and the blue cheese then give everything a very good mix to combine. The blue cheese will melt into the salad as you mix it, creating a cheesy, umami dressing. Transfer to a serving plate and dig in.

Got a question?