Classic Cobb Salad

Learn to make a traditional American cobb salad that's chock-full of crispy bacon, seasoned chicken, mounds of blue cheese, avocado, and hard-boiled egg. This is a "composed" salad, meaning the ingredients are arranged on the salad as opposed to all the components being tossed together. 

Cobb salad is a full meal by itself. With four different proteins—bacon, eggs, chicken, and blue cheese—it is very nourishing and you don’t need to serve anything with it. 

Whether you use grilled or roasted chicken, or any other leftovers from cooked chicken breast is up to your personal taste. If you don’t want to roast chicken yourself, a great shortcut is to use a  rotisserie chicken. 

For the dressing, this recipe uses red wine vinegar and Dijon mustard, which is the classic version. Some recipes use buttermilk in the dressing to add creaminess. The avocados should be very ripe because, in combination with the blue cheese, they give the salad its creamy consistency. 

Cobb salad is named after Robert Howard Cobb, the owner of the Hollywood Brown Derby, a chain restaurant in Los Angeles. Originally it was a way for the restaurant to use up leftovers, but it soon became the restaurant’s most famous dish. 

Cobb salad can be prepared ahead of time: fry the bacon, wash and chop the veggies, dice the chicken, and whip up the dressing. Keep all the ingredients in airtight containers in the fridge to prevent them from drying out (if you are short on containers, you can store two ingredients in the same container, just keep them separate). Assemble or layer the salad just before serving and make sure that you use a very large dinner plate because it needs to fit a lot.