You will love this Apple Cranberry Salad with fresh greens, crispy apples, dried cranberries, creamy cheese, crispy bacon, and crunchy walnuts all tossed in an easy to make apple cider vinaigrette dressing recipe. It’s a perfect green salad for Thanksgiving, Christmas or fall.

 

If you are needing a fresh green salad for Thanksgiving this Apple Cranberry Salad with Walnuts will be a great side dish for the holiday. It’s a lighter option that many of your guests will appreciate. Toss your finished green salad with our homemade Apple Cider Vinaigrette dressing, it pairs perfectly.
If you like apple salads you will want to try my Creamy Apple Salad or Snickers Salad recipes. They are both delicious side salads.

During the fall months and especially during the holidays we are consuming so many heavy comfort foods. A light and fresh green salad topped with fall fruit can lighten those meals. Choose whichever fruit you like or consider serving a Thanksgiving Fruit Salad as a light option.

I chose a simple mix of salad greens and a combination of Honeycrisp and Green Apples for our Thanksgiving Green Salad. This combination is both sweet and a bit tart. Feel free to switch up to include your favorite in season apples. Another option would be pears but, I usually save those for a Christmas Salad.

For the cheese in our Apple Cranberry Salad, I went with blue cheese. The salty and creamy blue cheese crumbles blend well with the sweet and tart apples. If you prefer a different cheese, consider feta, or goat cheese. But, I believe a crumbled cheese works best.
Every green salad needs to include a bit of added crunch from toppings. Walnuts and crispy fried bacon bits are my choice for Apple Salad. Pecans or even almonds could also make this green salad a bit crunchier.

Now, the dressing is totally a preference thing. If you are entertaining, you can offer a couple varieties of dressing. I like to make my a simple apple cider vinaigrette dressing. The flavors are perfect with this salad combination.
If you would like to consider other dressing for tossing this salad you could also try our Raspberry Vinaigrette Dressing or Simple Salad Dressing recipes as well.

Apple Cranberry Salad Ingredients

You’re not going to need many ingredients for this Apple Cranberry Salad recipe. You can probably grab all these salad toppings the next time your at the grocery buying your usual salad ingredients. Here’s all you need:

• Salad Mix – We’re going to add all of these tasty ingredients to some normal salad mix to make this recipe. We used this spring mix, but you could just as easily use something like a 50/50 mix, baby spinach, or some sort of lettuce blend if you’d like.
• Walnuts – The easiest choice here is buying a bag of chopped walnuts and using those.
• Craisins – These dried cranberries are just like raisins except they’re cranberries instead of grapes.
• Bacon – You’re more than welcome to make bacon on the stovetop and chop it down into some bacon bits like we did. If you would like to save time, grab some pre-chopped and precooked bacon pieces from the store. Skip the fake stuff if possible.
• Apples – Most apples will work for any sort of apple salad recipes. We just grabbed a green apple and a honeycrisp apple we had on hand- choose a combination of red and green to keep your salad festive.
• Blue Cheese – This salad topping just adds a bit of a tangy and salty bite to our salad. You’re more than welcome to omit it if you’re not a big blue cheese fan.
• Vinaigrette – To top the entire salad off, you’ll want a tasty vinaigrette. We went with this Homemade Apple Cider Vinaigrette but feel free to experiment. You can make your Cranberry Walnut Salad with Raspberry Vinaigrette or even Cranberry Vinaigrette.

See recipe card for quantities.

How to make Apple Cranberry Walnut Salad

Our Apple Cranberry Walnut Salad is a pretty easy salad recipe to make. If you wanted to, you could just toss everything together in a bowl to combine before topping with vinaigrette. To get something closer to our pictures here, this is what you’ll do:

• Lay a bed of salad greens in a shallow plate or salad bowl before topping with walnuts, craisins, and bacon bits. Core apples and cut into thin slices before laying on top of your salad. Sprinkle with blue cheese, top with vinaigrette of choice, and enjoy!

Storage / Freezing

Storage: If you have any leftover salad, you can transfer it to an airtight container and keep it in the fridge for another day. For longer-term storage, optionally toss apples with lemon juice, assemble your salad but don’t add your vinaigrette or dressing. Store the salad and dressing separately in the fridge for 2-3 days.

Freezing: Between the actual salad greens, the vinaigrette, and toppings like the blue cheese, we’d recommend you avoid freezing salad. Freezing tends to make most leafy greens all mushy and unpleasant to eat raw. Just enjoy your salad while you have it and use the fridge for storage if you must.

Other Salad Recipes to Try

Salad

House Salad

Side

Old-Fashioned Cranberry Salad

Side

Waldorf Salad

Side

Walnut Strawberry Salad