Tiny diced Shirazi salad with tons of fantastic summer flavors is one of the best simple salads. The flavors do all the work, but the heavy lifting in the recipe is all in the dicing. Careful small cuts help make a chopped salad a star of the table in no time.
Want more of a main dish over side dish? Serve all these vegetable goodies on leafy greens or with your choice of protein for a guilt-free delicious meal idea. Let’s get started!
Why you will love making Shirazi Cucumber Tomato Salad
Easy to Alter – The key to tiny chopped salad is all in the ingredients. While English cucumber, tomatoes, and red onions have always been a fantastic grouping, there are many ways to switch it up.
Make this one Greek, Asian flare, or good old-fashioned southern food; use any fresh ingredients to make this recipe your own.
Salad and Salsa – While this dish is meant to be a salad you can eat with a spoon, it also layers quite nicely as a fresca salsa on tortilla chips, corn chips, or pita bread.
Where did this salad come from? The origins of the salad are rooted in Israeli, Iranian salad Shirazi and Persian cultures.
Salad Ingredients:
- Cucumbers – cut into tiny pieces/diced
- Roma tomatoes – Seeds removed and cut into tiny pieces/diced.
- diced red onion
- lemons
- extra virgin olive oil
- kosher salt and black pepper
- optional salad flavors: diced black olives, garbanzo beans, rinsed black beans, or chickpeas
How to make Tiny Chopped Salad
- The key to this entire tiny chopped salad recipe is in the chopping. The cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions must be carefully diced down to small pieces before moving on to the rest of the recipe.
- Once chopped, add cucumbers, ripe tomatoes, and onions to a medium bowl and mix well.
- Add the fresh lemon juice of 2 lemons (or lemon juice if that is all you have) and olive oil to the mixing bowl.
- Season generously with salt and pepper and mix well.
- Let diced salad stand for flavors to mingle or cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.
- Makes 6 cups of salad.
All that tiny chopping can be tedious. Use really good knives or for ease and precision, a vegetable chopper.
Chopped Recipe Variations
Get caught up on those dicing skills because this tiny chopped salad can easily add many different ingredients.
- Fresh Vegetables – Bell pepper, kalamata olives, green olives, or Chopped purple or green cabbage.
- Cheese – If wanting to add more Mediterranean flavors to this delicious salad, add feta cheese or goat cheese.
- Protein – Turn Israeli salad into a main dish by adding chicken (our favorite is this chicken 101 recipe) to it.
- Day of ingredients – I love diced avocado in salads, but it goes brown quickly, so add all diced avocado day of serving.
- Spices – Another change in healthy salads is just switching up the spices. Try cloves garlic, pepper flakes for some heat, or a little sprinkle of balsamic vinegar.
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Shirazi Salad – Finely Diced
Ingredients
Diced Salad
- 4 small cucumbers finely diced
- 3 Roma Tomatoes finely diced
- ¼ cup red onion finely diced
Dressing
- 2 lemons
- ¼ cup olive oil
- salt and black pepper
Instructions
- Finely prep vegetables by dicing cucumbers, tomatoes, and red onions. This salad is all about the tiny vegetable bites, so using a chopper can help keep pieces uniform.
- Add cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions to a large bowl and mix well.
- Add the juice of 2 fresh lemons and olive oil to large mixing bowl.
- Generously season with salt and black pepper and mix well.
- Let salad stand for flavors to mingle (it tastes better if you give it 2 hours) or cover and refrigerate until ready to serve
Notes
- Protein – Turn Israeli salad into a main dish by adding chicken.
- Day of ingredients – I love diced avocado in salads, but it goes brown quickly, so add all diced avocado day of serving.
- Spices – Another change in healthy salads is just switching up the spices. Try garlic, pepper flakes for some heat, or a little sprinkle of balsamic vinegar.
Nutrition
Nutritional information is an estimate and provided to you as a courtesy. You should calculate the nutritional information with the actual ingredients used in your recipe using your preferred nutrition calculator.
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