Wildflower Chopped Salad and Wildflower Pesto Vinaigrette Recipe

Check out this delicious Wildflower Bread copycat of one of my favorite salads! The Wildflower chopped salad has arugula, couscous, dried cranberries, roasted red peppers, feta, and sunflower seeds drizzled with pesto vinaigrette. I swapped the couscous for quinoa for higher protein and added black beans for even more protein. No worries if you don't have a Wildflower Bread near you, you can make this copycat recipe at home!

Wildflower Bread Company is a cool little chain of cafes/restaurants in Arizona that sells a lot of tasty salads and sandwiches. I think of them as an even yummier version of Panera, with more inventive menu options.

I was lucky enough to eat at Wildflower often when we visited Arizona several years ago. This was an excellent opportunity to familiarize myself with their menu.

Unfortunately, I currently live nowhere near a Wildflower Bread, considering I reside in New England. Luckily, I can still enjoy dishes similar to the ones I enjoyed there with fakeaway Wildflower Bread recipes! This Wildflower Bread Chopped Salad is the first of several copycat recipes that I have planned.

If you're new to making chopped salads, may I recommend that you get yourself a salad chopper? It makes chopping the ingredients so much easier!

What's great about this chopped salad though is that the only ingredient that needs fine chopping is the arugula. The soft roasted red pepper can be chopped finely pretty easily with a regular knife, and the rest of the ingredients need no chopping.

This might be the easiest chopped salad ever! Just gather and stir.

Wildflower Chopped Salad

My chopped salad has a few differences from Wildflower Bread's recipe. First, I swapped couscous for quinoa to make this gluten-free and to add more protein. Second, I added some black beans to the salad for even more plant-based protein.

Finally, I'm using roasted corn rather than the dried sweet corn that Wildflower uses. This last substitution was based more on product availability here versus anything else. Here's a pic of all of the players in this one:

I kept the pesto vinaigrette simple, using just prepared pesto and white wine vinegar. Pesto already has plenty of oil, garlic, herbs, and so on. The only thing it really needs to turn it into dressing is some vinegar, or perhaps citrus juice.

I am always on the lookout for creative ways to use pesto because I have so much! My radish plants bolted (flowered), rendering the radishes woody and inedible.

However, I was still able to use the leaves to make a delicious pesto. My carrot leaves pesto recipe works perfectly for radish tops too!

The last thing I want to say about this salad recipe is that dried cranberries do typically have added sugar. Because they are so tart naturally, they will often be sweetened to the level of "non-cranberry comparable products" (e.g., raisins).

Substitute an unsweetened dried fruit for the dried cranberries if you'd prefer to altogether avoid added sugar. Unsweetened dried cranberries are available, but they can be challenging to find in regular grocery stores around here.

I think you're really going to enjoy how easy this chopped salad is to make, as well as how delicious it is! I made a video for you below that shows the salad assembly process in action. Enjoy!

📖 Recipe

Do you ever make copycat recipes for your favorite restaurant dishes? If you try this fakeaway Wildflower Bread chopped salad, please leave a rating below! I love how chopped salads let you get a taste of everything in a single bite.

P.S. If you dig copycat recipes, my cheeseburger salad (based on a B.good burger) is not to be missed!

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