Kale Salad with Roasted Sweet Potatoes

A raw kale salad with roasted sweet potatoes, pecans, cranberries, and an apple cider vinaigrette offers a delightful blend of flavors and textures. An easy Fall salad packed with seasonal ingredients. It’s hearty, making it a satisfying side or main dish for dinner or lunch. Raw kale, roasted sweet potatoes, crunchy pecans, sweet cranberries, and a bright apple cider vinaigrette combine wonderfully for a simple yet flavorful salad.

While cooked kale is delicious, it shines equally in salads. One key to a kale salad is to massage the dressing into the leaves, softening them. Another benefit of using kale over other lettuce is its ability to hold up after being dressed, making leftovers enjoyable for lunch the next day.

Any type of kale is great in salads, but I chose to use Tuscan Kale for this one, which is also called lacinato kale, dinosaur or black kale. The leaves are flat and slightly more tender than the curly leaf kales.

If you want to add even more substance; some other great additions could be quinoa or farrow grain, apples or cheese.

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Kale and Sweet Potato Salad

A raw kale salad with roasted sweet potatoes, pecans, cranberries and an apple cider vinaigrette is super delicious and both vegetarian and gluten-free. 

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Course: Salad

Cuisine: American

Prep Time: 5 minutes minutes

Cook Time: 25 minutes minutes

Total Time: 30 minutes minutes

Servings: 4

Author: Justin McChesney-Wachs

Ingredients

• 1 Medium Sweet Potato , cut into 1/2″ dice
• 1 bunch Tuscan Kale (also called lacinato or dinosaur kale)
• 1/4 cup Pecans
• 1/4 cup Dried Cranberries

Apple Cider Vinaigrette

• 1/8 cup Apple Cider Vinegar
• 1 Small Shallot , minced
• 1 tsp Honey
• 1/2 tsp Dijon Mustard
• Kosher salt & freshly ground pepper
• 1/4 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 400 degrees. 
• Place the diced sweet potatoes on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Season with salt & pepper and drizzle with olive oil.
  
• Roast in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the sweet potatoes are tender.
• Meanwhile, make the vinaigrette by whisking all vinaigrette ingredients except for the olive oil in a medium bowl to combine. Then slowly drizzle the olive oil while continually whisking to emulsify. 
• Adjust the amount of vinegar and honey for your taste. 
• Remove the stems from the kale and hand tear the leaves into bite-size pieces. 
• Add the torn kale to the bowl with the vinaigrette and massage the dressing into the kale.
  
• Add the warm sweet potatoes, dried cranberries and the pecans to the bowl and mix to combine.