Kale Superfood Salad: Protein-Packed Vegan Recipe

This Vegan Kale Superfood Salad is packed with plant-based flavors and textures! The perfect no-cook meal for the warmer months!

This recipe was created in collaboration with Bob’s Red Mill, a brand I trust and use in my own kitchen. All opinions are my own — I hope you love this superfood salad!

Not long ago I wouldn’t have imagined combining sweet fruit with savory salad ingredients. I had a rigid idea that sweet should stay sweet and savory should stay savory. That changed when I added apples to an autumn pumpkin stew and discovered they developed a lovely, almost potato-like texture. Later I experimented with a strawberry barbecue sauce and found the sweet-and-savory pairing opened up a whole new realm of flavors for me.

With that new appreciation, I tried a prepared superfood kale salad from Whole Foods — it had strawberries, blueberries, cashews, red onions, and a sweet goji berry vinaigrette. It was good, but the cashews felt a bit overpowering next to the berries. I reworked the salad using Bob’s Red Mill pumpkin seeds instead, which provide just the right amount of texture and nuttiness while letting the berries shine. While Bob’s Red Mill is well known for flours, they also offer a wide variety of high-quality grains, seeds, and nuts that work wonderfully in recipes like this.

This is my take on that superfood kale salad. Instead of goji berries, which can be expensive or hard to find, I’ve made a slightly spicy-sweet orange vinaigrette that complements the other ingredients. The red onions are quickly pickled to mellow their bite, though you can skip them if you prefer. With raw pumpkin seeds and roasted sunflower seeds added at the end for crunch, this salad delivers a pleasing range of textures and bright, plant-based flavor.