It’s not every day that we have to whip up a salad just to stay relevant on social media, but the Green Goddess Salad has us doing exactly that. Even salad haters have spotted some merits in this green, guacamole-style salad dip. Its hype peaked when vegan sensation Lizzo endorsed it on TikTok recently. Celebrity nutritionist and author Pooja Makhija too recently shared her recipe on Instagram.
But is the Green Goddess salad really worth all this attention? Yes and no. The salad base isn’t all that fancy, it’s an anything-goes recipe and you can use any greens you have in your kitchen. But the dressing is what sets this number apart. It needs no less than 10 ingredients and can also take up quite a lot of your time.
Melissa Ben-Ishay, who owns the New York dessert company Baked by Melissa, first shared the video of the recipe on TikTok, where Ben-Ishay used it as a tortilla dip. The video managed to garner more than 19 million views! “It’s such a simple salad, it’s a very fine chop. I cook every day and one day I decided to film this (salad). The base is kind of like a slaw, there’s a specific way to get it fine. The dressing was inspired by pesto… I didn’t want it to be too overpowered by basil so I used spinach leaves,” Ben-Ishay recently shared on a cooking show.
The good news is you probably already have all of the ingredients you need for the 10-ingredient dressing. It needs olive oil, rice vinegar, lemon juice, garlic, shallots, spinach, basil, walnuts and nutritional yeast. “Nuts, greens and oil in the dressing can be subbed out for other varieties you have on hand, and you can do that for the veggies in the salad as well. This salad stays delicious in the refrigerator for up to a week! It tastes great alone, but my favourite (thing) is to eat it with chips like salsa. You can also use it on sandwiches or tacos,” Ben-Ishay shared in her own blog.
If you’re not a salad person or struggle to consume enough greens, this salad is ideal. If you don’t like cooking or even if you’re not too big on making anything from scratch, you could make this salad and stash it in your fridge for a week. It has a decent shelf life and can be used as a dip or a side for all your meals.
The Green Goddess salad, though simple, isn’t exactly a quick fix. Even if you’re making the salad for one person, you need to be prepared for some heavy chopping since the texture is meant to be consistent and somewhat creamy. And Twitter has a lot of opinions on how much chopping and re-chopping this number needs.