This spinach salad with bacon dressing pairs healthy ingredients with indulgent ingredients for an easy, well-balanced vegetable dish.

This spinach salad with bacon dressing is the only kind of salad that I like. It has all the light, fresh and healthy ingredients I need and dresses it with the salty-fatty bacon that I love.

I’d call it my Heaven and Hell salad, but I don’t really think any food is bad for you. As long as you pair fatty, salty, sugary ingredients with things your body needs, it’s not bad. In this case, it’s bacon and spinach. 

Spinach

Baby spinach in bags are readily available everywhere these days. To me, it’s easier to grab a bag than washing the grime out of a bunch of regular spinach. I also happen to like baby spinach because it’s more tender and easier to eat than full-grown spinach leaves. But feel free to use whatever spinach is available. 

Bacon 

The bacon bits add a sprinkling of natural salt along with unparalleled crunch to each bite. If it sounds too indulgent, this recipe only uses three slices of bacon and 1 TB of bacon grease. When the bacon grease is distributed over a pile of spinach leaves, it’s making your saturated fat intake more manageable.

But bacon grease is every bit as important as the bacon bits—it’s used in place of olive oil. In fact, dressing this salad is so easy, you don’t need anything but the vinegar and cooked bacon fat, not even dijon mustard.

I intentionally don’t whisk the vinegar and bacon fat together so that the bacon grease stays hot. The heat from the hot bacon drippings wilts the spinach, making it easier to eat as well as adding flavor to each leaf.

If you haven’t worked with bacon much, it’s not hard to get crispy bacon right. You add the bacon slices to a hot skillet over medium heat and let them cook until they’re crispy. Transfer the bacon to a paper towel and leave the grease in the hot pan until you’re ready to use it.

Pro tip: if you don’t save your bacon grease, don’t pour it down the sink or the garbage disposal. Leave it in the pan until the fat is white and solidified. Wipe the pan out with a paper towel and toss it in the trash. Wash the pan as you normally would.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes and bacon are a magical flavor combination. It takes all the umami in both ingredients and shoves it in your face in the most gentle way. Every time I take a bite of this salad, I half expect it to come with toast and mayonnaise to make it a BLT. Adding a few sourdough croutons would defo elevate this salad.

I use grape tomatoes, halved, but any kind of tomato will work. I also like using vine-ripened—they always tend to be super-red and flavorful.

Just remember to store your tomatoes on the kitchen counter and NOT the refrigerator. Refrigerating tomatoes destroys the texture and won’t make them very tasty for salad. If you’ve already made the mistake, you can toss them into a forgiving tomato sauce or tomato soup.

Red Onion

I use 1 TB or .5 oz of thinly sliced red onion. I always have a cut onion on hand that I used for multiple recipes at any given time, but I realize not everyone does that. To avoid buying a whole onion that you’ll only use part of, you can use a whole, thinly sliced shallot. 

Walnuts & Blue Cheese 

Like bacon and tomatoes, blue cheese and walnuts are a classic flavor combination that also complements bacon.

If raw walnuts are what you have on hand, toasting the but meats is pretty easy. Toss the pieces into a hot skillet over medium heat. Stirring occasionally, cook the walnuts until you can hear a hiss and smell the toasty nuts.

You don’t have to use the walnuts and blue cheese, but I highly recommend it. Crunch, creaminess and sharpness are the finishing textures for this spinach salad with warm bacon dressing—no need for salt and pepper.

This salad should be served immediately. Once it’s dressed, it’s not going to store very well, so plan to eat all of it at once after it’s made. It makes two lunch salads or four dinner salads.

It’s a very simple salad—there are no exotic spices, techniques or long list of ingredients. It’s great for using up those last few slices of bacon in the pack or the last half of your bag of spinach. If you’re feeling really resourceful, it can be a way to use up old bread. Cut it into cubes, toss it with some olive oil and toast them in a skillet, and you have a restaurant-quality salad.