Wild Rice Salad

This beautiful Wild Rice Salad is a restaurant-worthy dish that you can easily make at home! Make this arugula salad with nutty wild rice, pomegranate seeds, apples, and feta, top it with a simple homemade vinaigrette, and get ready to impress your guests at your next holiday or weekend dinner.

Wild rice is a totally underrated recipe ingredient. You don’t find it commonly, but it’s so delicious, it really should be featured in more recipes!

So I decided to play with adding more chewy, nutty, nutritious wild rice to our meal plan, and this Wild Rice Salad is one of my new favorite things. It’s a makeover of a wild rice salad recipe that I posted here back in 2016, and it’s now perfected and complete with step-by-step photos and lots of handy tips.

Salads with wild rice have the most amazing blend of textures and flavors – everyone is going to love this recipe!

Why You’ll Love This Recipe

1. An Easy yet Fancy Salad – I love making salads because I can dress them up or down depending on my mood and who I’m serving. This salad isn’t complicated, but it uses sophisticated ingredients like wild rice, pomegranate arils, roasted pecans, peppery arugula, and balsamic vinegar to create a gourmet side salad with very little extra effort.
2. Salad with Fruit – Adding fruit to salad automatically takes it to the next level. This wild rice salad includes pomegranates, apples, and dried cranberries to give it a healthy sweetness. You can see this delicious salad trick in action in my Pear Salad and Beet Salad recipes too.
3. The Delicious Homemade Salad Dressing – Forget bottled salad dressing – it’s expensive and sub-par. It takes 60 seconds to mix up a delicious vinaigrette for this salad, and it will be so much better than any balsamic vinaigrette you’ve bought before.

Key Ingredients

Here’s what you need to make this amazing salad:

• Arugula (aka, Rocket) is a soft, peppery green that pairs perfectly with the sweet and savory flavors in this salad. If you aren’t a fan of arugula, you can substitute with a less bitter green like frisée, baby spinach, dandelion greens, or spring mix.
• Wild Rice – You may already know that wild rice isn’t really rice at all. It’s actually a different, distinct grain that is the same shape as rice. It’s a dark brown color, chewy when cooked, and has a nutty, toasted flavor.
• Pomegranate Seeds – These are technically called pomegranate arils and can sometimes be purchased already “harvested” from the fruit, or you can buy a whole pomegranate and do it yourself! I’ll add some tips for that process below for you. It’s fun but takes a few minutes.
• Apples – When using apples in a salad, be sure that the apple you choose has lots of flavor and isn’t too soft. Gala, Fuji, or Honeycrisp apples are perfect.
• Dried Cranberries, Sliced Red Onion, and Toasted Pecans.
• Feta Cheese – Crumbled salty feta is amazing on this salad! You can also try it with crumbled blue cheese or goat cheese if you like.
• Homemade Salad Dressing: Extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, dijon mustard, honey, garlic, salt, and pepper come together in the most amazing way to dress this salad.

Complete list of ingredients and amounts can be found in the recipe card below.

How To Make This Amazing Salad with Wild Rice

1. Cook the Wild Rice: Feel free to do this part well ahead of time if you like, since we will want the rice to be cold or room temperature when we make the salad. In a saucepan bring 4-6 cups of water to a boil, add ½ teaspoon of salt and 1 cup of wild rice. Cover with a lid and reduce to a simmer, lower the heat to the lowest setting possible, and cook for 30 minutes. The rice is done when some of the grains burst open.

2. Make the Dressing:  In a bowl or a small jar combine the olive oil with balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard, honey, garlic, salt, and pepper. Whisk or shake well until combined. You want the dressing to be emulsified and creamy.

1. Make The Salad! Add the cooked rice, arugula, onion, pomegranate seeds, diced apple, cranberries, and pecans to a large bowl. Before serving, add the dressing and toss gently to combine. Then top with crumbled feta cheese.

Recipe Tips

• Crumble your own feta cheese. Instead of buying cheese crumbles, buy a block of cheese and crumble it yourself just before adding it to the salad. It tastes so much better this way!
• Red Onions: I like the bite of freshly sliced red onion in this recipe, but if you’d like to make your onion a bit less intense, soak the slices in cold water for 5-10 minutes.
• To Remove Pomegranate Seeds: Cut the pomegranate in half horizontally. Then, hold one half, cut side down, in your palm, over a bowl. Whack the pomegranate (you need to hit it harder than you might think!) with a wooden spoon to get the seeds to pop out.
• Instead of Pecans, try toasted slivered almonds or walnuts. You can also use pepitas or sunflower seeds to make this recipe nut-free.
• Add Protein. Cooked shrimp, sliced chicken, or leftover seared steak would all be a wonderful addition to a wild rice salad.

Storing Tips

Enjoy this salad right away after adding the dressing. The greens will wilt if left for too much time.

If you want to plan ahead, you can cook the rice up to 2 days ahead of time. Store it in the fridge until you’re ready to build your salad.

What To Serve With Wild Rice Salad

This tasty salad makes a delicious side dish or first course for a fancy dinner party, a holiday meal, or a regular weeknight dinner.

The flavors in wild rice salad will pair wonderfully with perfectly grilled steaks, a prime rib roast, a roast turkey tenderloin, or stuffed cornish hens.

And while these proteins are perfect for entertaining, if you’re cooking for your family you might enjoy making something more simple. Try my Instant Pot Chicken Drumsticks, Air Fryer Tilapia, or Hamburger Steak with Gravy.

You can also serve wild rice salad as the main entrée! Add a side of dinner rolls or breadsticks for a satisfying light meal.

Recipe FAQs

This Wild Rice Salad is such a fantastic and sophisticated dish! Serve this for your next holiday or party, or surprise your family with a fancy side dish tonight.