Wilted Lettuce Salad

When you’re tired of the same old salad, you’ll want to make this Wilted Salad. It’s still a simple meal solution but the savory homemade dressing offers fresh new flavor… and bacon. What’s not to love?!

This Wilted Lettuce Salad recipe is really easy to make at home. It has lettuce, spinach, and green onion along with bacon and a hard-boiled egg. The wilting comes in when you mix up the dressing with the bacon drippings and red wine vinegar.

There are more details about making this wilted lettuce salad below, or you can click here to jump straight to the recipe.

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1. What Is A Wilted Salad?
2. How To Make Wilted Lettuce Salad
3. More Salad Recipes
4. Wilted Lettuce Salad Recipe

What Is A Wilted Salad?

Wilted Salad might conjure up thoughts of old lettuce shoved in the back of your refrigerator, but you couldn’t be more wrong. The base of this salad is made with 3 types of fresh crisp greens: leaf lettuce, iceberg lettuce and spinach. The wilted part comes when you finish it with a tangy warm dressing with bacon, but we’ll get to that next. If your mouth isn’t watering yet, it will be soon.

How To Make Wilted Lettuce Salad

After you fry up some bacon, you’ll let it cool a few minutes then crumble it over the salad before adding the dressing and finishing off each serving with half a hard boiled egg.

And that brings us to the dressing. You aren’t going to buy mediocre bacon dressing from the store. Instead, we’re showing you how to make it with ingredients you likely have at home – red wine vinegar, salt, sugar, and, of course, bacon. Or rather, bacon drippings from the bacon you tossed into the salad.

The dressing has just the right balance of sweet, salty, and tangy that makes you keep going back for another bite. It doesn’t make the salad soggy, it just slightly wilts it when you toss it together. You will want to eat it immediately after preparing for ultimate freshness.

Wilted Lettuce Salad Recipe

Contributor: Ilona Orzechowska

When you’re tired of the same old salad, you’ll want to make this Wilted Salad. It’s still a simple meal solution but the savory homemade dressing offers fresh new flavor… and bacon. What’s not to love?!

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5 from 1 review

• Author: Ilona Orzechowska
• Prep Time: 10 minutes
• Cook Time: 10 minutes
• Total Time: 20 minutes
• Yield: 2 servings 1x
• Category: Entrée
• Method: Stovetop
• Cuisine: American

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Ingredients

Units USM Scale 1x2x3x

• 2 cups leaf lettuce cut into bite sizes
• 2 cups iceberg lettuce cut into bite sizes
• 1 cup spinach
• 1/4 cup chopped green onion
• 5 strips of bacon
• 3 Tbsp. red wine vinegar
• 2 Tbsp. water
• 2 tsp. sugar
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 1 hard-boiled egg cut in half

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Instructions

1. In a large bowl combine lettuce, iceberg lettuce, spinach and green onion. Set aside.
2. Heat frying pan over medium heat, add bacon strips. Cook about 3-5 minutes on both sides. Remove the bacon from heat and cool off.
3. Add red wine vinegar, water, sugar and salt to the bacon drippings. Whisk vigorously.
4. Pour the dressing over salad.
5. Crumble the bacon and add it to the salad. Mix everything together well.
6. Top each serving with one-half the hard boiled egg.

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This post originally appeared in May 2019 and was revised and republished in May 2024.