Hungryly scrolling through the TikTok For You page can inspire any palpable craving—dessert-style coffee, crispy rice, crab Rangoon. But the latest mouth-watering food trend on TikTok is less obvious: a super-chopped, dippable salad.
Melissa Ben-Ishay, perhaps best known for her Baked by Melissa mini cupcakes, has become the green queen on TikTok since launching her Green Goddess Salad in September 2021. The original video, which now has nearly 19 million views, shows how to prepare a salad so finely chopped that you can (and will) shovel it into your face with chips instead of a fork. Since the OG video appeared on the For You page, videos tagged #GreenGoddess featuring TikTok users trying the recipe themselves have racked up more than 18 million views. Here's the review: The "salad" was excellent.
"Melissa's baked salad is a star in my house. We make a big bowl of it every week and eat it with a bag of chips and call it dinner," Brit, 34, a New York-based food writer, tells Bustle. "It looks like it's going to be overpriced, and the ingredient list might make you think it's not worth the trouble, but it turns out it's the perfect salad - especially for people who don't like salads," she adds.
Even if you don't have time to go to the grocery store and buy all the vegetables and herbs you need to make a Green Goddess Salad at home, you'll get a lot of satisfaction from watching Ben-Ishay make it on TikTok. ASMR-style slicing, chopping, and crunching will send your ears and eyes into brain-stimulating overdrive. While many viral trends turn out not to be as delicious as they seem in reality—the cream cheese pepper sandwich never needed to be—the Green Goddess Salad is actually worth it.
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TikTok-Viral Green Goddess Salad Ingredients
In the original video, Ben-Eisha flicked through the ingredient list without exact measurements, but since the salad went viral, she's created more videos showing the exact recipe. Here are the ingredients you’ll need to make the Green Goddess Salad:
For the salad base:
- Small heads of green cabbage, or iceberg lettuce, or both
- Four small cucumbers, or one large cucumber, chopped
- A bunch of finely chopped chives
- A bunch of chopped green onions or scallions
- Optional: jalapeños
For the dressing:
- Juice of two lemons
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- Two tablespoons of rice vinegar
- two cloves of garlic
- One green onion
- Sprinkle some chives
- 1/4 cup walnuts, cashews, or both
- 1 cup freshly torn basil leaves
- 1 cup fresh spinach
- Sprinkle generously with nutritional yeast
- 1 teaspoon salt
How to Make Green Goddess Salad at Home
Get out your largest bowl for the salad, because it's piled high and requires a lot of mixing for optimal flavor. Wash and chop all produce as efficiently and finely as possible—the smaller the pieces, the easier they are to soak. After mincing the cabbage, cucumber, scallions, and chives, pull out of the food processor and begin seasoning. Add all ingredients to processor and pulse until smooth. If it's too thick for you, you can add some water or more oil and adjust the ingredients slightly to your liking. Once the dressing is combined, pour it over the salad base, stir well, and enjoy with your favorite heavy-duty chips.
