Simple Kohlrabi Salad with Vinaigrette

A simple kohlrabi salad recipe prepared with grated or shredded raw kohlrabi and dressed with an easy to prepare vinaigrette dressing.

This refreshing salad can be prepared in advance. Here is how it's made from scratch at home.

Jump to:

• 📕 What is Kohlrabi?
• 🥗 What is this Salad?
• 🥬 Ingredients
• 🔪 How to make it?
• 💡 Tips
• 🍴 Serving
• 🍱 Storing
• 💭 FAQs
• 📖 Recipe
• 💬 Comments

📕 What is Kohlrabi?

Kohlrabi is a roundish bulb root vegetable. It's juicy on the inside, and it has a hard thick skin, which will remind you of Broccoli stems.

In fact, Kohlrabi, Broccoli, Cauliflower, and Jicama stem from the same vegetable family.

The taste of a Kohlrabi is rather neutral and comparable to turnips, but it's crunchy, adding a lot of texture to the experience of enjoying Kohlrabi raw.

This vegetable can be cooked too, as in my Potato Purée with Kohlrabi recipe.

🥗 What is this Salad?

This salad was somewhat inspired by my mum's shredded french carrot salad and her simple turnip salad.

Kohlrabi roots are either grated or taken through a food processor. The choice is yours. This technique makes the preparation time effortless!

It's somewhat a kohlrabi slaw recipe.

A French style vinaigrette dressing is poured over the Kohlrabi to season it.

The salad is then served with chopped chives as a small side dish salad with other main course meals as an accompaniment.

This salad is naturally vegan, gluten-free, low-carb and low in calories.

🥬 Ingredients

Here is what you will need to make this salad from scratch at home.

For the Salad:

• Kohlrabi – Fresh raw root vegetables. I used white kohlrabi, but you can use purple or other kohlrabi varieties as well.
• Chives – Freshly chopped. I like homegrown chives with pink/purple flowers. The flowers add colors and flavor to the salad.

For the Dressing:

• Salt
• Black Pepper
• Dijon's style mustard – the mustard helps emulsify the dressing. The result is a well blended, smooth dressing.
• Vinegar – I like to use apple cider vinegar, white wine vinegar or any other natural vinegar. You can use synthetic vinegar too if that is what you have at home. Vinegar can be substituted with lemon juice too.
• Oil – I use a neutrally flavored oils such as vegetable oil, sunflower oil, canola oil. You can also use extra virgin olive oil and avocado oil.

I use garden-fresh Kohlrabi to make this salad, but you can, of course, get some quality Kohlrabi from your local farmers market or organic store.

They are common vegetables in the Western hemisphere and I have seen them in tropical areas too, sold at local bazaars.

🔪 How to make it?

This is a step by step overview to help you make my kohlrabi salad with vinaigrette dressing.

The full recipe with measurements can be found further below in the printable recipe card, all together with the video showing the process in action.

Step 1

Discard Kohlrabi stems and leaves if any and peel the vegetable.

Cut off tough and bad parts.

Step 2

Cut Kohlrabi into chunks.

Place Kohlrabi chunks into a food processor to shred or grate fine manually.

Step 3

Prepare the dressing by combining first salt, black pepper, vinegar, and mustard.

At last stir in the oil and whisk into a vinaigrette dressing.

Step 4

Place Kohlrabi in a bowl and add chopped or cut fresh chives to that.

Pour the dressing over the salad and mix it all together. Serve up.

💡 Tips

• You can make variations of this salad by adding other veggies such as shredded carrots, cucumber, turnips to the salad.
• Another idea is to drizzle a few drops of balsamic vinegar or pumpkin seed oil over the salad as a topping.
• To make it spicy or pungent, add some grated horseradish or chili pepper flakes to your salad.
• You can also use freshly chopped parsley instead of chives as a green garnish.
• Use a good vegetable peeler to peel off the skin because the outer Kohlrabi layer is really hard. I like the Victorinox peeler, it comes in a Y shape. It is sturdy and takes care of the hardest vegetable peels.

🍴 Serving

We love this small side dish salad with a main course lunch or dinner meal. It goes with most meal types.

For example, a pasta or ravioli dish, a casserole meal such as a cottage pie or pot pie, a meaty meal as in meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

It's a refreshing small salad and its purpose is to add something green to a carb and protein rich meal.

In the recipe, I have specified two servings, but we tend to half the servings further and enjoy a minimal quantity with our meals.

I will leave this up to you, but know that the salad recipe quantity can be split into 2 or 4 servings.

🍱 Storing

To prepare this salad in advance to store in the fridge, I recommend not combining the shredded kohlrabi with the vinaigrette ingredients. It gets soggy otherwise.

Shredded kohlrabi can be stored in your fridge in a container for up to 4 days. Just make sure that the container is covered with a lid.

The dressing can be prepared last minute, just before serving time OR I recommend preparing a small bottle of vinaigrette dressing if you intend to use this dressing more often.

Kohlrabi salad dressed with the vinaigrette is good for 1–2 days in the fridge.

💭 FAQs

📖 Recipe