Brighten up your dinner table with this vibrant Spring Spinach Salad. It features fresh baby spinach greens, pickled eggs and beets with a delicious vinaigrette salad dressing. It’s the perfect make ahead salad for potlucks, dinner parties, brunches, and holiday dinners.
Spring is a time for renewal and fresh starts. Our family enjoys the warmer weather and we crave flavourful salads like Snap Pea Salad with Feta Salad and Strawberry Spinach Salad.
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Spring Spinach Salad with Pickled Eggs and Beets
Though you can find all of the ingredients for this spinach salad year round, I tend to think of it as a Spring Salad. It’s become a family tradition to serve this fun salad for Easter dinner. However, it would be great for any potluck or dinner party because you can make all the components ahead of time and compose it just before meal time.
The fuschia tinted eggs are the highlight of this salad. They look stunning and are sour and salty, with just a touch of sweetness. Since the eggs are pickled in a jar along with the beets, they absorb the natural fuschia dye and earthy flavour.
Switching Up a Classic Spinach Salad
Google spinach salad recipes and you’ll find a variety of salads with toppings ranging from cranberries and goat cheese to mandarin oranges with almonds. You can even make spinach salad a full meal but topping it with grilled chicken.
Besides the pickled eggs and beets, there are finely chopped shallots in the dressing. The salad dressing is a pretty standard vinaigrette. It contains a stunning rosé wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, Dijon mustard and garlic.
The spinach salad recipe is certainly not difficult but you do have to make it a day ahead of time. This makes it a perfect ‘make ahead’ dish for your Easter feast. It really comes together quickly after the initial pickling process. When you’re hosting dinner for the whole family, any recipe made ahead of time is a winner!
Salad Ingredients
This beauty of a salad is full of simple healthy ingredients. Every component is fresh and the vinaigrette is made from scratch. When a vinaigrette is so easy to make, there’s no need to buy it from a store.
- Baby Spinach
- Beets
- Eggs
- Water
- Sugar
- White Vinegar
- Celery Seed
- Mustard Seeds
- Shallots
- Dijon Mustard
- Honey
- White or Rosé Wine Vinegar
- Olive Oil
- Salt
- Pepper
- Garlic
- Fresh Chives
While this is essentially a Spinach Salad, adding other greens or using a Spring salad mix would also work. Try massaged kale, frisée, red or green leaf lettuce or butter letter in place of the baby spinach.
Small red beets work the best in this recipe. They cook quickly and will absorb more of the brine than larger beets. Try switching the red beets for yellow beets for naturally yellow dyed eggs.
Shallots are a classic vinaigrette ingredient however you can use finely diced red onions in their place. If the red onions are quite strong, dice them and soak them in cold water for 10-15 minutes.
Dijon mustard is one of those ‘classic’ additions to French vinaigrettes. It adds a little more zip to the overall flavour and aids in emulsification of the oil and vinegar.
I found the beautiful pink rosé wine vinegar at Costco and knew it would be perfect for vinaigrettes. If you make your own Chive Blossom Vinegar you can use that too. Or, you can use regular white wine vinegar or even a white balsamic vinegar.
Lastly, please use your best Olive oil in this dressing. Since it makes up the bulk of the vinaigrette, it’s important to use a full flavour olive oil.
How to Make a Classic Vinaigrette
The vinaigrette recipe for this salad is very basic. To make it, simply add the rosé wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, shallots, Dijon mustard, and garlic to a small mason jar.
It’s much easier (and cleaner) to shake the dressing than to whisk it together in a bowl. Screw the lid on tightly and shake the ingredients until they are entirely emulsified.
If you like, you can add finely chopped fresh herbs for a more intense flavour.
How to Make Beet Pickled Eggs
As you can see from the photos, there is quite a large ring of beet dye around the eggs. To achieve this, I boiled up the simple brine and allowed it to cool to room temperature.
Next, I cooked the eggs in an instant pot for five minutes on high pressure then allowed them to sit for 5 minutes before releasing the pressure.
Then I also cooked whole beets in the instant pot under high pressure for 15 minutes. When a fork easy slides into the beets, they are ready to pickle.
Peel and cut the beets in half, then place them and the peeled eggs, along with the cooled brine in a large mason jar. Cover and place the jar of eggs and beets in the fridge for 24 – 28 hours. Less pickling time would give you a thinner ring of pink.
Assemble the Spinach Salad
Arrange the baby spinach in a large salad bowl then scatter the beets all over. Carefully slice the dyed eggs in half and arrange on the salad. Pour the vinaigrette dressing over the salad and garnish with chopped fresh chives. Serve immediately.
If you make this Spinach Salad with Beet Pickled Eggs, please be sure to leave a comment and/or give this recipe a rating! Be sure to follow me on Facebook and Pinterest for my latest recipes. Also, if you do make this recipe, please tag me on Instagram, I’d love to see what you guys are making! Thank you so much for reading my blog.
Adapted from: Ricardo Cuisine Magazine
Spinach Salad with Beet Pickled Eggs
Brighten up your dinner table with this vibrant Spring Spinach Salad. It features fresh baby spinach greens, pickled eggs and beets with a delicious vinaigrette salad dressing. It's the perfect make ahead salad for potlucks, dinner parties, brunches, and holiday dinners.
Ingredients
FOR THE PICKLED EGGS
- 12 small beets
- 12 small eggs
- 1 cup (250 ml) water
- 1 1/2 cups (375 ml) sugar
- 1 tablespoon (15 ml) salt
- 2 1/2 cups (625 ml) white vinegar
- 1 teaspoon (5 ml) celery seed
- 1 teaspoon (5 ml) mustard seeds
FOR THE VINAIGRETTE
- 1/4 cup (60 ml) olive oil
- 2 tablespoons (30 ml) white wine vinegar
- 2 tablespoons (30 ml) chopped fresh chives
- 1 teaspoon (5 ml) Dijon mustard
- 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml) honey
- 1 garlic clove; very finely chopped
- Salt and Pepper
- 1 bag baby spinach
Instructions
FOR THE PICKLED EGGS
- In a large pot, cook the beets in water for about 30 minutes or until tender.
- Cool them in cold water and peel. Transfer to a 2 litres (8 cups) jar.
- In a saucepan, place the eggs and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil over high heat. When the water begins to boil, cover and remove from the heat. Let stand for 12 minutes.
- Place the eggs in very cold water to stop the cooking. Peel the eggs and place them in the jar with the beets.
- In a saucepan, bring the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, and spices to a boil.
- Pour into the jar over the beets and eggs. Let cool and refrigerate for 24 hours.
- Cut the eggs in half to enjoy the colour contrast.
FOR THE VINAIGRETTE
In a bowl, combine all the ingredients. Season with salt and pepper.
FOR THE SALAD
Divide the spinach among four plates. Garnish with eggs and beets. Drizzle with the vinaigrette. Adjust the seasoning.
Nutrition Information:
Yield:
6Serving Size:
1Amount Per Serving: Calories: 203Total Fat: 8gSaturated Fat: 2gTrans Fat: 0gUnsaturated Fat: 5gCholesterol: 283mgSodium: 248mgCarbohydrates: 12gFiber: 2gSugar: 8gProtein: 11g
Nutritional calculation was provided by Nutritionix and is an estimation only. For special diets or medical issues please use your preferred calculator.
[…] out how to make this spinach salad here! If you love beets and spinach then this is the salad for […]
I’m always on the hunt for a good salad recipe and I love that this one uses eggs as the protein. Looks so vibrant and colorful! Perfect for Spring!
It’s such a fun salad. Happy Spring Genevieve.
This salad is so delicious! The instructions are super easy to follow. Highly reccomend!
Glad you enjoyed this salad, it’s one of our favourites!
What a beautiful salad! I love the ring of beet dye around the eggs! It looks really awesome! Can’t wait to make one for my family!
It’s kind of fun to add this salad to the Easter dinner menu. It adds a bit of pizzazz!
First off that color from the beets is just gorgeous!! But really this is the perfect spring lunch with the protein from the eggs!
It really is so pretty. You are right, this would be a great lunch salad too.
Love this pickled egg and beet salad! I love the zing that the pickling brings to the eggs!
A zing of flavour and a zap of colour!
This has to be the prettiest way to make pickled eggs ever. I absolutely love the contrasting colours, and they way that the beet juice fades in towards the vibrant yolk. The salad is wonderful, and the simple but flavourful vinaigrette is a perfect touch to bring it all together. Thanks for sharing this!
Thank you Sean. I hope you and the family are doing well!
I have never made pickled eggs but when I do, I’ll definitely do it this way too. These look awesome – yum!
I always have a jar of regular pickled eggs in the fridge! Just how I grew up I guess.
I love beets in salads and this is so colorful too!
Me too. They are a salad staple in this house.
I have never even heard of pickled eggs but the pink is just too cute.
Oh my god how did i miss this post? These eggs are amazing!!!
I don’t know?! 🙂
a very pretty dish. I’ve bookmarked the recipe! Thanks
Alex
Thank you Alex, enjoy and please do let me know how it went!
I can certifiably say I never get sick of beets. And any pickle flavour with them = good by me. It brings back memories of family dinners and the giant pickle platter my Grandma would always leave out. This salad just screams SPRING Bernice. I’ll take two bowl fulls please.
I never tire of the root… vegetable.
Pickled beetroot is a good friend of mine. I like what you did with the eggs, too 👌
I do get a bit tired of beetroot and other root veg in the winter. When you live in Canada, the winters are long and fresh local produce is very limited. Root veggies are all that’s left at the farmer’s markets right now. The tasteless fruit and veg that gets shipped in from around the world is expensive and poor tasting.
True dat. We’ve got it too good put here…
These eggs are gorgeous and look so pretty alongside the beets in a salad. A great dish for Easter!
Thank you Jennifer 🙂 We ate the rest of the eggs last night…they weren’t as nice because they were solid fuschia!
Wow – looks wonderful – love this idea!
Thank you Keith 🙂 I don’t know how you can even look at food after all that testing you are doing, HA!
Yes – bizarrely it is hard work! I gave my stomach a rest for a day!
Oh my goodness, that’s a pretty salad! I can only eat very small amounts of eggs (I have a food sensitivity), but I might be tempted to try this.
I love this kind of salad, in that in between time between root vegetable season and full on spring vegetables. And aren’t there an awfully good selection of recipes in the Ricardo Easter collection?
oh my gosh YES! we just had the maple glazed pork tenderloin tonight…another winner!