15 Colorful Ingredients To Add To Your Summer Salad

A good summer salad should be three things: bright, fresh, and easy to pack. But to celebrate the warm weather and enjoy a meal that's as aesthetically pleasing as it is delicious, why not reach for some lesser-known, colorful ingredients?

Whether you're a brand new gardener looking for a great vegetable to grow as a beginner or just heading to the store needing ideas, colorful summer salad ingredients do so much more than make your meal look pretty. Oftentimes, an array of colors means an equally diverse range of flavors, scattering sweet, floral, herbal, and even spicy notes throughout your greens. Plus, even if you can't find the exact variety of ingredient you want, it's easy to substitute with something similar without sacrificing your desired flavor profile.

You can also prepare many of these ingredients in different ways. You can marinate your ingredients for a more flavorful salad, pickle them for a dash of acid, ferment them for more umami, or just keep them raw to provide tons of juiciness and different textures. How you include them is up to you, but colorful ingredients are always great choices for everything from a packed lunch to an outdoor picnic.

Sweet and rich, these dark tomatoes add a bit of darkness to your salad, emphasizing the bright colors of other ingredients. Often considered as one of the most delicious types grown in America, it's a tomato you'll wish you tried sooner once you experience how incredibly flavorful it is. Dense and fleshy, it's a great substitute for proteins like tofu or chicken when you want a vegetable-packed meal.

Not quite red and not quite green, lucky tiger tomatoes straddle both types with a sugary, tangy flavor. It has beautiful evergreen and ruby coloring when ripe, and the stripes that earned it its name add a bit of colorful texture to your salad. These may be a little hard to find in the store, but it's an incredibly productive, easy-to-grow variety that fruits early in the season and is just as good for snacking as it is for salads.

These little gems are one of the most gorgeous varieties of cherry tomatoes available and are full of a complicated sweet tanginess that adds layers of depth to your salad. Perfectly round and bright orange, you can cut them in half, leave them whole, or dice them up to quickly add bursts of color to your salad while all but guaranteeing some amazing flavor.

The pale orange to bright yellow of acorn squash is beautiful, but its flesh isn't particularly tasty when raw. However, if you roast your acorn squash with a blend of chili pepper and salt, chop it up, then let it cool in the fridge overnight, you'll be left with a colorful addition to your salad. This is a particularly great ingredient because it adds a creamy texture to your meal, almost like a soft cheese, diversifying color, mouthfeel, and flavor all at once.

If you opt for a particularly dark green for your salad like arugula or kale, sometimes paler vegetables can pop even more than brightly colored ones. In this case, the ghostly pallor of banana peppers is an excellent choice. Sweet and mild, its color won't change much whether you leave it raw or pickle it ahead of time, ensuring you have a beautifully pale addition that stands out from the crowd.

When you want a variety of colored peppers but want to maintain some consistently sweet taste, lunchbox peppers are your best friend. While their flavors do vary slightly between red, orange, and yellow, they all have an almost sugary flavor that pairs wonderfully with their crisp textures. Plus, these peppers have a beautiful, matte coloring that pairs well with glossier vegetables for a nice aesthetic.

Bell peppers are a classic addition to any salad, but diversifying colors adds more than just different tastes. For your next summer salad, try slicing up every color you can find rather than just one to easily add a rainbow to your meal. Since their colors are so distinct, it broadcasts the exact flavor of your next bite, making each one a new experience.

Striking as it looks, this is actually a true cucumber! Unlike green varieties, this one has a bit of complexity to it, with slightly sweet, soft flesh that goes perfectly with crunchy, stronger greens like endive or chard. Plus, its gorgeous rind, white meat, and pale seeds create a beautiful topping with several colors all in one vegetable.

Sometimes, when you want an extra colorful salad, it helps to add something more muted to really make those colors pop. This unique, massive cucumber from India does exactly that, but its striated skin also adds an eye-catching pattern to your meal that will have passersby asking, "What is that?" These are delicious when stir-fried with chili paste and then chilled in the fridge, giving you the chance to add some delightful new tastes and colors to really liven up your salad.

Looking like someone turned a geode into a vegetable, watermelon radishes are gorgeous kaleidoscopes of color. Bright and refreshing, these classic salad additions are fantastic for softer greens that may need a bit of crispness to deliver a great taste. Try slicing them into discs then quartering them to ensure that all their colors are on full-display for the best looking salad for your season.

Sometimes you need a bit of mulled spice flavor in your salad, but don't want to rely on a dressing to deliver it. Instead, try sprinkling in some cornflower petals! As flavorful as they are beautiful, this is one of the few ways you can add a bit of blue to your meal for something truly unique.

One of the most commonly consumed edible flowers, Jamaican sorrel hibiscus is a beautiful addition to salads no matter how you add it. The petals' gradient from creamy white to deep magenta is great for adding soft floral notes. However, that fleshy bulb at the base of the fruit, the calyx, is a sour little firecracker of flavor similar to cranberry.

It may be hard to sacrifice a future squash for the sake of today's salad, but these big, beautiful blooms are one of the tastiest and most versatile salad toppings you can find. Full of squashy and floral flavor, they straddle the line between vegetable and flower to deliver a unique taste. Plus, you can gently pry them open and stuff them with everything from cheese to sausage to create a hearty, summery centerpiece for your salad.

Red onions are no strangers to salad, but pickled red onions provide a much greater depth of flavor and a completely new type of color. If your salad is already packed with shiny, full colors, paler strands of pickled red onions act like tinsel on a Christmas tree, decorating each ingredient in a frosty purple. Plus, they're a great way to add any salt and acid that your dressing might lack.

If you're looking for possibly the most unique and colorful topping possible, look no further than pickled magnolia flowers. Rich with a spicy, gingerish flavor that pairs well with soft cheeses, creamy dressings, and nuts, magnolia blossoms are truly beautiful in both taste and appearance. Older, open blossoms can be a bit bitter, however, so try to harvest magnolia once it reaches its full size but hasn't quite opened yet.