Turkish Salads: 9 Classics Worth Making

If you want to know which Turkish salads are actually worth making, here is my honest shortlist: çoban (shepherd’s salad), gavurdağı, piyaz, kısır, plus a handful of simpler ones you will see on every restaurant table. None of them are hard. Most come together in fifteen minutes with a knife and a few vegetables, and the dressing is almost always the same three things: olive oil, lemon or vinegar, and salt.

Turkish cooking gets a lot of attention for its kebabs, soups and pastries, and rightly so. But the salads do quiet, important work. They cut through rich grilled meat, they fill out a meze spread, and a couple of them are basically a meal on their own. Below I have gone through the classics, what goes in each one, and when I would actually reach for it.

What do Turkish salads usually contain?

The short answer: tomato, cucumber, onion, green pepper and a lot of fresh parsley. Those five turn up again and again. After that you get into the variations, lettuce and cabbage for winter salads, white beans for piyaz, bulgur for kısır, roasted eggplant for the smoky ones.

The dressing is where Turkish salads stay refreshingly simple. For the everyday side salads, you whisk olive oil with lemon juice or grape vinegar, add salt, and that is it. The two ingredients that quietly do the heavy lifting are sumac (a tart, dark-red ground berry) and nar ekşisi, pomegranate molasses, which adds a sweet-sour depth. Once you have both in the cupboard, a lot of these salads suddenly taste like the ones you get in Gaziantep rather than a watery version at home. For the basic side salads like çoban and mevsim, though, you genuinely do not need anything fancy. Salt to taste is enough.

One small note on the peppers. Turkish recipes usually call for sivri biber, the long, slim green pepper that runs from mild to medium heat, or the sweeter çarliston. If you only have a regular bell pepper that is fine, you just lose a little of the gentle warmth.

The everyday salads you will see on every table

These are the ones that arrive almost automatically, the salads a lokanta (casual home-style restaurant) sets down with the bread before you have even ordered.

Çoban salatası (shepherd’s salad)

This is the one to learn first. Finely diced tomato and cucumber in roughly equal amounts, plus onion, green pepper and chopped parsley, dressed with olive oil, lemon and salt. Some cooks add a little dried mint. The name comes from shepherds who carried a couple of tomatoes and an onion out to the fields and chopped a rough salad for lunch. Interestingly it is not an ancient dish at all, food writers trace it to the 1950s, which surprised me when I first read it. It is a summer salad above all, when tomatoes are ripe and cheap. Pair it with anything off the grill.

Mevsim salatası (season salad)

When tomatoes go out of season, mevsim takes over. It is built on crisp lettuce, purple cabbage, shredded carrot and parsley, sometimes with rocket or watercress thrown in, tossed in the same lemon and olive oil dressing. The name literally means “season salad” because you bend it to whatever is fresh. This is the winter answer to çoban, and it sits very happily next to a heavy güveç stew or a plate of kebabs.

Soğan salatası (onion salad with sumac)

Barely a salad and all the better for it. Thinly sliced onion massaged with salt to soften its bite, then tossed with plenty of parsley and a generous shower of sumac. That tartness is the whole point. You will see this served alongside grilled meat and döner, where it does the job of a condiment as much as a side. If you have ever wondered what that pile of reddish onions next to your kebab is, this is it.

Kaşık salatası (spoon salad)

The trick here is in the name: everything is chopped so fine you eat it with a spoon. Tomato, onion, green pepper and parsley diced to near-rubble, often lifted with pomegranate molasses and a spoon of red pepper paste. It comes from the southeast and it is essentially a more intense, finely textured cousin of çoban. Great scooped up with bread.

The salads that can be a meal

These are the heavier, more substantial ones. Several double as meze, so they belong as much on a meze table as next to a main.

Gavurdağı salatası

My personal favourite, and the one I would send you to first. Gavurdağı comes from the Gaziantep and Adana region, named after a mountain down south, and it is a tomato salad with real personality. Ripe tomato and spring onion, green pepper and parsley, then the two things that make it: roughly crushed walnuts and pomegranate molasses. The result is sweet, sour, nutty and rich all at once. If grilled meat is on the menu, this is close to mandatory. Do not skip the walnuts, they are not optional here.

Piyaz (white bean salad)

Piyaz is a proper plate of food, not a side garnish. White beans (haricot beans) with red onion, parsley and tomato, dressed with a sharp lemon or vinegar dressing and a lot of sumac. In Antep the local version is famous and often comes with tahini in the dressing. Many cooks crown it with hard-boiled egg. High in protein, tart, filling, it is the kind of salad you can build a light lunch around, especially in summer.

Kısır (bulgur salad)

If you have had tabbouleh, kısır is the Turkish relative, and to my taste the more interesting one. Fine bulgur soaked until tender, then mixed with masses of parsley and mint, tomato or pepper paste, lemon, olive oil and sumac. It is naturally vegan, travels well, and is a fixture at gatherings and tea afternoons. People often eat it wrapped in lettuce or vine leaves, scooping it up by hand. Make a big bowl, it keeps for a day or two.

Patlıcan salatası (smoky eggplant salad)

The smoky one. Eggplant charred over a flame or under a grill until the skin blackens and the inside goes soft, then peeled, mashed and mixed with peppers, onion, garlic, olive oil, lemon and sometimes a little yogurt. That charred flavour is everything, so do not be shy with the heat when you roast the eggplant. It is a regular on the meze table and overlaps with the broader family of Turkish eggplant dishes, which the country has more of than almost anywhere.

How to serve Turkish salads

Salads in Turkey are rarely the star. They are the supporting cast that makes the main dish sing. A few honest rules of thumb:

• With grilled meat or kebabs, go for çoban, soğan salatası or gavurdağı. The acidity and crunch cut the richness.
• For a meze spread, lean on piyaz, kısır and patlıcan salatası alongside dips and warm bread.
• In winter, mevsim salatası is your friend when good tomatoes are nowhere to be found.

If you are cooking a Turkish meal at home, think about pairing too. These salads sit naturally next to rice, yogurt-based dishes like cacık, and the broad world of famous Turkish foods. And if you are eating your way through Istanbul rather than cooking, you will meet most of these without trying. They show up at breakfast, at lunch, and at dinner, and they are part of why a proper Turkish breakfast feels so generous.

Final thoughts

Start with çoban to get the rhythm, then make gavurdağı when you want something with more swagger and kısır when you need a salad that can feed a crowd. The ingredients are cheap, the technique is mostly just chopping, and the payoff is high. For a step-by-step version of the basic recipe, see our Turkish salad recipe guide. Once you have a couple of these down, you will find yourself making them on repeat all summer.