Sugar Snap Pea Salad

This snap pea salad recipe brings together crispy raw snap peas, fresh herbs, feta, and a simple lemon vinaigrette. It is fantastic!

We honestly don’t use snap peas enough, despite them being such an incredibly easy vegetable to work with. This easy salad is our attempt to fix that. It hits every note—crunchy, crisp, fresh, and filling.

The last time we made this snap pea salad, I found myself craving it for days. I really cannot wait for you to try it! If you are looking for another way to use snap peas, be sure to check out our Greek yogurt pasta with snap peas.

Key Ingredients

• Snap Peas: These have more rounded pods with a sugary-sweet flavor. You can eat the pod and peas inside. Don’t confuse these with shelling peas, which have more fibrous pods (these are what English peas or that bag of frozen peas in your freezer come from). The other variety of peas you might see while shopping for this recipe are snow peas, which we use in our shrimp stir-fry. They are flatter and less sweet, but would be a good substitute for the snap peas in this recipe.
• Radishes and Green Onions: These are the other veggies in the salad. I especially love raw radish and snap peas together! So crispy and crunchy.
• Fresh Herbs: This is a bright green salad, so pile in a bunch of fresh mint and parsley. They bring the entire salad together.
• Cheese: In our photos, we have used crumbled feta cheese (which we both love). That said, grated Parmesan, Pecorino, or even a soft goat cheese would all be lovely in this salad. Since we use that simple vinaigrette, you really can have some fun with the cheese here and take it in any direction you’d like.
• Vinaigrette: The dressing in our recipe below is almost identical to our favorite lemon vinaigrette—just scaled down a little to match the salad. It combines shallot, lemon, honey, Dijon mustard, and olive oil. If you don’t have a shallot, use half of a small sweet onion instead.

Find the full recipe with measurements below.

How to Make a Snap Pea Salad

Tip 1: How to cut the snap peas. This is a shaved snap pea salad, so you’ll need to slice your snap peas on the diagonal. Slicing them this way makes the salad a little easier to eat and lets that vinaigrette get everywhere. I like to work in batches. First, I trim the ends, then I slice them thinly on a diagonal. It’s pretty easy and makes this salad really pretty in the end.

Tip 2: Make the dressing in your salad bowl. If you have followed us for any length of time, you know our distaste for extra dirty dishes. So in most of our salad recipes, we make the dressing at the bottom of the bowl we plan to toss and serve the salad in. That method works nicely here!

Tip 3: Don’t hold back on the herbs. This is a fresh salad, and so it really benefits from the extra herbs (especially the mint). You can probably even add more than the recipe below calls for, and it will turn out well.

Serving Suggestions

We made a big batch of this snap pea salad the other day and have enjoyed the leftovers with almost every dinner since. It’s really versatile! It packs a good amount of flavor, so it really holds its own against mains like honey mustard chicken, yogurt marinated chicken, salmon burgers, shrimp scampi, and this baked lemon chicken breast.

It’s also lovely with other veggie sides like beet salad, German potato salad, creamy cucumber salad, and our no-mayo herb potato salad.

For a quick lunch or dinner, we’ve also topped it with a generous spoonful of tuna salad or this smashed chickpea salad. Both were delightful!

More Veggie Forward Dishes

• Cheese Stuffed Zucchini Boats
• Cherry Tomato Salad with Feta
• Garlic Ginger Spicy Edamame
• Cauliflower Chickpea Salad
• Cauliflower Steaks (with chimichurri sauce)