Simple Carrot Salad

This carrot salad is fresh and healthy, with a tangy vinaigrette dressing! It’s easy to make, ideal for cookouts, potlucks, as a side dish, or for lunch.

Carrot salad might sound humble, but it’s anything but. Serve this carrot salad to your friends and family, and they’ll be singing your praises! We know because after we made this at our house, it disappeared within minutes. It’s simple and refreshing, featuring strings of carrots doused in a a tangy Mediterranean-style vinaigrette. Just a handful of ingredients and you have a healthy side dish you won’t want to stop eating. Here’s how to make it!

Ingredients for carrot salad

This carrot salad is based on the French carrot salad, or salade de carottes râpées meaning “salad of grated carrots.” Per David Lebovitz, it’s sold all over the country at bistros, cafes and supermarkets. And we can see why! The light tangy dressing, crunchy carrots and savory sweet flavor all meld together into a dreamy concoction. The flavors are a little like what keeps us going back to the bowl of broccoli slaw or coleslaw.

Here are the ingredients you’ll need to make this simple carrot salad:

Carrots: large or small
Green onions
Parsley
White wine vinegar
Dijon mustard
Sugar or maple syrup: use maple if you like no refined sugar recipes
Olive oil & salt

How to julienne carrots: 3 ways!

The only hard part of this carrot salad, if there is one, is how to julienne the carrots. You can grate the carrots if you’d like, but we love the look of a good julienne. Julienne cut is cutting a vegetable into long thin matchsticks. The slices have squared off edges. You can julienne carrots with a knife if you’d like. But for this salad, there are a few faster ways:

Handheld peeler: Use a handheld julienne peeler. Here’s the one we use.
Food processor: Use the grating blade on a food processor. Feed in the carrots through the hole in the top of the lid.
Grater: Here’s a shortcut: use the large holes on a box grater! Grated carrots are in flatter pieces than julienne, but they’ll work in a pinch.

Use the Dijon mustard dressing on any salad!

The dressing for this salad is simple and tangy: made with Djion mustard, vinegar and olive oil. It’s actually a half recipe of our famous Dijon mustard dressing. It’s a vinaigrette that works on just about anything! Here are some salads it would be perfect on:

Asparagus Salad with Feta This salad uses the Dijon dressing to amp up sauteed asparagus, feta, greens and crunchy veggies.
Perfect Italian Salad This classic Italian American salad works well with Djion dressing, too!
Spinach Apple Salad Spinach salads are fantastic with this dressing.

Storage info

Because this type of French carrot salad is designed to sit in a cafe or grocery store counter, it stands up to time well. You can store it refrigerated for up to 3 days, and the flavor still stays fresh and tangy. If it loses a little flavor after refrigerating, you can always mix with a little drizzle of white wine vinegar, olive oil and a pinch of salad.

Ways to serve carrot salad

This carrot salad is perfect for lots of occasions: potlucks, cookouts, to accompany a dinner main dish, or even for lunches! Here are a few ways to serve it:

With a main course: Serve with grilled salmon, grilled shrimp, veggie burger or portobello burger.
Plate of salads: Try with creamy potato salad, Italian pasta salad, Greek orzo salad, French lentil salad, cucumber salad, or watermelon salad.
For lunch: Add easy chickpea salad, tofu scramble, seasoned cannellini beans, or chickpea salad sandwich.

This simple carrot salad is…

Vegetarian, vegan, plant-based, dairy-free and gluten-free.