Recipe for Italian Chopped Salad

This recipe for Italian Chopped Salad is packed full of flavor and good ingredients! It can be a dinner or a lunch! It comes with a delicious Homemade Italian Dressing that you will want to put on everything!

I love a good salad, a salad I can make a meal of with a delicious vinaigrette to top it off and make it complete. In Illinois, there’s a restaurant called Portilo’s and lately I’ve been craving some of their salads. But since we sadly do not have that restaurant here, I decided to create my own incredible salad to crave. This recipe for Italian Chopped Salad certainly fills the gap! And maybe I like it even better than there’s?

What’s in the recipe for Italian Chopped Salad

There are so many good things in my recipe for Italian Chopped Salad! Basically, I tried to cram and entire antipasto platter from my family Christmases into this salad. (Minus the prosciutto.) I’m not at all sorry about it because it make it one amazing salad!

As a base, I use romaine and arugula. I love that romaine is a lettuce most people can find easily and I love that the arugula makes it a little extra special.

I decided to use pepperoni and Italian Salami in my recipe for Italian Chopped Salad because they’re easy for everyone to find. You don’t have to go to a special store and you can usually get a lot of it if you want to truly make this a big salad for a party.

As for the veggies, the sky was the limit for me. It includes red onion, Kalamata Olives, tomatoes, banana peppers, roasted red peppers and artichokes,

Lastly, I added chickpeas (AKA Garbanzo Beans) for some additional protein and fiber. You can also use pasta noodles if you like. I recommend Ditalini, which are those small, round noodles often found in Minestrone.

Homemade Italian Dressing

I love my Homemade Italian Dressing and it works really well on this Italian Chopped Salad. With an extra virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar base, I packed it with a bunch of lovely dried herbs and parmesan cheese. All of that really compliments the ingredients in the salad well and brings out the flavors.

I’ve used versions of this in other recipes before but I have to say, if there was one dressing I would make to have on hand all the time, it’s the one in this recipe for Italian Chopped Salad.

You can make this several days ahead of time and store it in an airtight container in the refrigerator. Just take it out about an hour before you want to use it to allow the extra virgin olive oil to come to room temperature again. I always make it in a mason jar and use these lids {HERE} for storage. If you want widemouth lids, you can find them {HERE}.

Tips for making this recipe for Italian Chopped Salad

• Use high quality extra virgin olive oil. It is the base for the salad and something you don’t want to skip on.
• Make sure to use chopped squares of mozzarella. I find shredded mozzarella mixes a bit too much with the Parmesan in the dressing.
• If you want to make this ahead of time, do not add the dressing. You can mix everything together and add the dressing before you eat to individual bowls. I mixed all my ingredients together ahead of time and then just added the dressing whenever I wanted a bowl of it.
• You can also cut all the ingredients in advance and store the to make it easier to throw this salad together for gatherings and parties. It feeds about 4 with BIG bowls of salad. It will feed 6 with smaller bowls and maybe 8 with everyone scooping some out onto their plates at a party.
• You can cut and store ingredients individually up to about 2-3 days in advance. I only recommend mixing the ingredients a day in advance.
• As for storing it, keep it covered in the refrigerator after mixing ingredients. You can probably keep it in there for two days before the lettuces will start to wilt. For best results though, I would say 24 hours would be my max refrigeration time.

Looking for more salads?

If you love a good salad, you should try these amazing salads also on the site!

• White Bean Salad {HERE}
• Asparagus and Arugula Salad {HERE}
• Shrimp Salad with Old Bay {HERE}
• Rotini Pasta Salad {HERE}
• Chopped Thai Chicken Salad {HERE}
• Peach Panzanella Salad with Burrata and Bacon {HERE}

Thank you so much for visiting today, friends! I hope you love my recipe for Italian Chopped Salad with Homemade Italian Dressing. You can find the full, printable recipe below. I hope to see you again!