Bean salad is a common salad composed of various cooked beans—typically green, wax, kidney, and/or lima beans—tossed in a sweet-sour vinaigrette. Variant ingredients include fresh raw onions, bell pepper, and/or other cooked or raw vegetables, such as chickpeas.
Bean salad can also be prepared as a pickled dish, making it a popular choice for home canning. Salads prepared with this method should be used within a year for best quality.
A salad dressing is a sauce for salads, a condiment used on virtually all leafy salads. Dressings may also be used in preparing salads of beans (e.g., three bean salad), noodle or pasta salads and antipasti, and forms of potato salad. A dressing may even be made for fruit salads. Salad dressings can be drizzled over a salad, added and tossed with the ingredients, or offered "on the side". The functionality of some of these sauces has been extended, meaning they can be served as a dip (as with crudités or chicken wings).
A salad is a dish consisting of mixed ingredients, frequently vegetables. They are typically served chilled or at room temperature, though some can be served warm. Condiments called salad dressings, which exist in a variety of flavors, are usually used to make a salad.
Garden salads have a base of raw leafy greens (sometimes young "baby" greens) such as lettuce, arugula (rocket), kale or spinach; they are common enough that the word salad alone often refers specifically to garden salads. Other types of salad include bean salad, tuna salad, bread salads (such as fattoush, panzanella), vegetable salads without leafy greens (such as Greek salad, potato salad, coleslaw), rice-, pasta- and noodle-based salads, fruit salads and dessert salads.