If you haven’t heard of a Balela Salad, I promise it won’t disappoint. This Middle Eastern-style salad is fresh, filling, and perfect for a quick weekday meal. It uses legumes as the base and is filled with crunchy veggies and fresh herbs. Since we aren’t using any lettuce or leaves, this salad is ideal for making ahead and meal prep because it doesn’t get soggy! It will last up to a week in an airtight container in your fridge. You will find many different versions of this beautiful salad, so feel free to play around with the ingredients and make it your own.
What do you need to make Balela Salad?
You only need a few simple ingredients to make this salad, most of which you probably already have on hand. The star of the salad and our primary protein source are chickpeas. If you don’t have chickpeas or want to mix up your plant-based protein source, this salad works wonderfully with black beans, lentils, kidney beans, or fava beans.
We are using colorful bell peppers, cucumber, onion, and cherry tomatoes for our vegetables. For our herbs, we incorporate fresh mint and parsley. Dill makes a wonderful addition, too, if you have it. In the spice department, we have garlic, sumac, Aleppo chili, and cumin. If you don’t have sumac, you can simply omit it, and if you don’t have Aleppo chili flakes, paprika will work as an alternative. And last, to dress the salad, we use olive oil, lemon juice, and preserved lemon (or lemon zest).
Baleala Salad is wonderful served over a bed of greens, on top of roasted sweet potato, alongside some lemony cauliflower rice, scooped up with veggies, or had just as is. No matter how you decide to enjoy this salad, you can’t go wrong!
Recipe tips:
Make sure you cut all your vegetables in a uniform, relatively small size. I like to use my chickpea as a size guide.
If you want to add extra richness to the salad, I love it drizzled with my creamy tahini dressing. Looking to add some extra zing? Olives, capers, or sun-dried tomatoes are great!
Ingredients
- 3 cups cooked chickpeas (2 cans) drained and rinsed
- 1 medium red bell pepper diced
- 1 medium yellow bell pepper diced
- 2 Persian cucumbers diced
- 1 medium red onion finely diced
- 1/2 cup fresh mint chopped
- 1/2 cup Italian parsley chopped
- 1 garlic clove finely minced or grated
- 2 tsp chopped preserved lemon, or the zest of one lemon
- 2 tsp sumac
- 1 tsp cumin powder
- 1/23 tsp Aleppo chili flakes, or paprika
- salt and pepper to taste
- 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
