Chef notes

This protein-packed salad riffs on one of France’s most popular salads: salad niçoise. This beloved salad is the star of the South of France, and for good reason. It’s a celebration of the bounty of the Mediterranean, and is equally fulfilling as it is beautiful.

Reigning from Nice, France, the ingredients included in this salad have admittedly changed over time. The first iterations of salad niçoise from the 1800s featured a combination of tomatoes, anchovies and olive oil, and was thought of as food for the lower classes at the time, due to its simplicity. Over the years, other ingredients became commonplace in the dish including hard boiled eggs, olives, green beans and potatoes.

In this sheet-pan version of salad niçoise, seared tuna is swapped for salmon filets, which cook alongside potatoes, cherry tomatoes and green beans. While the oven does the heavy lifting here, all that needs to be done is boiling a few eggs and making a punchy salad dressing.

Technique Tip: You can use any waxy potatoes you have on hand — just make sure to cut them into 1-inch pieces so that they cook evenly along with the other ingredients.

Swap Option: The joy of salad niçoise is that this dish is a blank slate for experimentation. While not traditional, you can add in or swap out your vegetables of choice such as zucchini, fennel, radishes and snap peas. Keep them raw or place them on the sheet pan until charred.

Get Ingredients: If you don’t have everything you need on hand, you can easily purchase all of the ingredients (just click the orange button below that says ‘Get Ingredients’). You can pick and choose exactly what ingredients you need based on what’s in your pantry and they’ll be on your doorstep before you know it.