The BEST Keto Cobb Salad Recipe

With ingredients like fresh romaine lettuce, bright red baby tomatoes, avocado, chicken breast, and crispy bacon it’s hard not to get excited about this keto Cobb salad. This low-carb salad is anything but ordinary and filled with all of the protein and fats you need to make it through your day.

Perfect for lunch or dinner, salad is a great way to stick to your low-carb, keto, gluten-free, dairy-free, and Whole30 lifestyles. It can also be paleo with a small adaption (which is included below!).

Salad may get a bad rap as being rabbit food, unfilling, and empty, but this low carb Cobb salad is anything but.

Check out our other salad recipes like taco salad, cold broccoli salad, curry bacon coleslaw, and spinach salad with hot bacon dressing.

A printable recipe card is at the bottom of the post

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Low Carb Cobb Salad

So if you have been avoiding salads as part of your low-carb eating plan let me just ask you one question – why?

Salads are a great way to make sure you are getting a hearty serving of veggies.

They are super versatile. You could eat a salad every day for lunch but also have something different each day.

And unless you are simply serving iceberg lettuce with a few tomatoes, salads are rarely boring.

Yeah, I said it. With so many wonder variations available to salad lovers, there is no reason you cannot find a salad that fills you up and satisfies your palate.

However, I will also caution you when it comes to salads. Common topping, like dressings, croutons, and tortilla strips, can take your perfectly healthy lunch and wreck it. Just because you have lettuce, chicken, and hard-boiled eggs as a base does not mean you can top it with tablespoons of dressing and hand-fulls or croutons. 😉

But, with this keto Cobb salad, I don’t think you are going to want to. Between the chicken, bacon, avocado, feta cheese and various veggies, you are going to find the flavor doesn’t need the additions your old salad did. This salad truly eats like a meal.

What’s in a Cobb Salad?

As with pretty much every recipe, your finished product will only be as good as the ingredients you put into it. And since most of this recipe is being served fresh and without cooking, be sure your vegetables and avocado are fresh, ripe, and about as close to perfect as you can find.

• Romaine lettuce
• Avocado
• Bacon
• Hard-boiled eggs
• Chicken
• Baby Tomatoes
• Blue cheese
• Green onion
• Dressing of your choice- blue cheese, oil and vinegar, cilantro lime, etc

This keto Cobb salad recipe is one that you can toss together in just a few minutes, but you are going to need to have your chicken and bacon pre-cooked. For this recipe, I used my pan-fried chicken tenders, but Instant Pot chicken tenders or a store-bought rotisserie chicken would also work.

For the bacon, well that I cooked up earlier in the week on my meal-prep day in the oven. And the eggs were hard-boiled easily in my Instant Pot.

For lettuce, we used an 8 oz bag of Romaine. This should make enough for 2-3 individual keto Cobb salads.

Recipe for Cobb Salad

To make an individual salad:

1. Lay a bed of lettuce in the bottom of a low bowl or on individual plates.
2. Add 2-3 cooked chicken tenders, sliced.
3. Add 1 hard-boiled egg, sliced or cut into sections
4. Add 2 slices of bacon, chopped (we used applewood smoked, no sugar added)
5. Cut up 1/3 of a cup of baby tomatoes cut in half.
6. Slice and add 1/4 avocado.
7. Top with 1/4 cup blue cheese crumbles.
8. Add dressing of your choice. Blue cheese dressing is always a great option!

***Note: You could easily create a larger version of this keto Cobb salad and serve it in a bowl family style. Simply double or triple the recipe based on the number of people you are serving. Serve dressing options on the side.

How to Make a Healthy Cobb Salad

Like I said earlier, this is a hearty salad. If you would like to reduce the calories it contains here are a few ideas:

• Use turkey bacon in place of traditional bacon.
• Opt for other protein sources instead of chicken such as shrimp or nitrate-free lunch meat.
• Use 1/2 of a hard-boiled egg per salad instead of a whole egg.
• Reduce or remove the cheese.
• Serve the salad without dressing.

A word of caution on dressings. Be sure if you are purchasing a store-bought dressing that it complies with your eating plan. Commercial salad dressings tend to have hidden sugars.

Another dressing option could be to simply make your own using oil and vinegar.

Making a Paleo Cobb Salad

Other than the blue cheese, a classic Cobb salad is paleo-friendly too. There are many paleo cheese substitutes on the market, many of which are made from nuts like cashews. While typically a Cobb salad includes blue cheese, not everyone likes blue cheese and maybe if there isn’t a commercial paleo-approved blue cheese substitute on the market, by all means, use something else! 

You can either substitute any of your favorite paleo cheeses for the blue cheese OR you can try this blue cheese paleo dressing by Jane’s Healthy Kitchen as a homemade substitute.

Another idea is to skip the cheese entirely and just use a creamy paleo-approved dressing to keep this a Paleo Cobb salad that’s as true to the classic as possible.

Keto Cobb Salad Recipe Tips

• To cleanly slice eggs, make sure the egg is cold and cut it with a cold, wet knife. Wipe the knife before cutting again. You could also try an egg cutter.
• Shredded chicken will work just as well as pan-fried tenders.
• Prepare your vegetables ahead of time, and vary the other ingredients during the week to have a variety of keto Cobb salad options.

Other Salad Recipes You’ll Love

• Keto taco salad
• cold Keto broccoli salad
• curry bacon Keto coleslaw
• spinach salad with hot bacon dressing

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