Recipes Using Italian Olive Salad

Are you a big fan of olives? This muffaletta olive salad will have you coming back for seconds. I promise it won't last long, and it's the key ingredient in a Muffaletta sandwich.

If you love Mardi Gras food, you'll want to try our muffaletta bread recipe and our king cake recipe. Don't miss our 13 Mardi Gras recipes, too!

All of these ingredients are easy to find at larger grocery stores, with most of them being shelf stable ingredients, so you can stock up for when you want to make your next muffaletta sandwich.

How To Make A Simple Italian Antipasto Salad

There you have it! A super tasty recipe that will knock your next muffaletta sandwich out of the ball park. Trust me, it's that good.

The main difference is muffaletta olive salad has olives in it along with giardiniera. Giardiniera's main ingredients are cauliflower, carrots, and celery, and it doesn't contain olives.

Our personal favorite is in a muffaletta sandwich, but it can also be mixed with lettuce, provolone, and salami for a salad. Use it as a pizza topping, or mix it with cream cheese and Parmesan cheese for a savory palmier filling. It can also be used as a crostini with goat cheese and prosciutto. You can also use it as a dip with a piece of warm, soft fresh bread.

Tortellini Olive Salad

Central Grocery is famous for their muffaletta sandwich, so their olive salad is in high demand with tourists. Central Grocery's olive salad has two kinds of olives: green pimento-stuffed olives and kalamata. It also has cauliflower, carrots, celery, red bell peppers, capers, and peperonici. A blend of soybean and olive oil along with water, vinegar, salt, garlic, and other spices makes up their dressing. To give it a long shelf life, it also has preservatives and food dye.

Olives are a good source of dietary fiber which helps you fill full. Olives are also low in cholesterol and are heavily used in Mediterranean diets. Olives are high in vitamin E, iron, copper, and antioxidants. Our muffaletta olive salad is low in carbs and is also high in vitamin A. For more nutritional information, please scroll to the end of the recipe card.

Make Ahead: This recipe is best if you make it ahead, as the ingredients need to marinate in the dressing for at least 8 hours.

Olive Salad (muffuletta Salad Recipe)

Muffaletta olive salad is the key ingredient in a muffaletta sandwich, which originated in New Orleans at Central Grocery.  Green and black Kalamata olives, giardiniera, vinegar, oil, garlic, and other goodies round out this family sized dish that is great for picnic lunches.

Serving: 0.5 cup Calories: 414 kcal (21%) Carbohydrates: 32 g (11%) Protein: 4 g (8%) Fat: 43 g (66%) Saturated Fat: 4 g (25%) Polyunsaturated Fat: 3 g Monounsaturated Fat: 24 g Sodium: 1863 mg (81%) Potassium: 98 mg (3%) Fiber: 2 g (8%) Sugar: 1 g (1%) Vitamin A: 306 IU (6%) Vitamin C: 19 mg (23%) Calcium: 45 mg (5%) Iron: 1 mg (6%)

This post was originally published on August 9, 2018 and was republished on January 28, 2022 with refreshed photos and updated, reformatted content.There’s only one store in my area that carries jars of the olive salad they spread on Muffulettas,  those irresistible New Orleans sandwiches loaded with Italian meats and cheeses. Sometimes the store has it; sometimes it doesn’t. When it’s in stock, I always pick up one, because now that we’re Planetarian, we regularly enjoy 

Delmonico Olive Salad

Muffulettas. We can make these highly flavorful and very satisfying sandwiches on-the-fly. And I’m always disappointed to see the grocery shelf empty, which is why I decided to develop an olive salad. To me, it’s that essential.

This homemade olive salad comes together in minutes and can be refrigerated for weeks, ready to pull out and spread on meatless Muffulettas and to perk up so many Planetarian dishes. We use it to flavor-punch salads—lettuce, pasta, and potato. We spoon it over avocado toast (when we don’t have any Roasted Cherry Tomato Confit!) and baked potatoes and stir it into rice, pasta,  and couscous dishes. When a recipe calls for olives, consider pulling out the olive spread—it’s colorful, flavorful and,  unlike a lot of olives that need pitting and chopping, it’s ready to use.

When making a meatless Muffuletta, we spread the olive salad over toasted split ciabatta rolls. If we’re in a hurry, we slap on a couple of slices of cheese—plant or dairy—and that’s it. We’ve got a satisfying sandwich on the go. If we have a little more time, we add thinly sliced red onion, bell pepper, and salted tomatoes. If you happen to have leftover grilled or broiled eggplant, it adds wonderful substance and flavor to this sandwich.

Olive Garden Salad Recipe

Many olive salads use kalamatas for the black olives in the mix. With all of the other piquant ingredients in the salad, we actually prefer the milder canned black olives. And many recipes use giardinieria in their olive salad. For better crunch and color, we microwave diced fresh carrots and celery with the vinegar for a minute to create little instant pickles.

If you have regular stuffed pimento olives, feel free to use them. We called for the salad variety because they’re cheaper, and since they’re getting chopped for the salad, they don’t need to be perfect.

“Welcome to Planetarian Life! This is a fun, friendly place for anyone looking to eat less meat and dairy. Wherever you are on the journey, from curious omnivore to committed vegan, I’m so glad you’re here. Cook with confidence knowing

Olive & Celery Salad

Planetarian Life is a community working together to create a brighter, more hopeful future for the Earth. We need you - more people equals more impact! Start by signing up for our newsletter, you’ll receive a not-yet-posted Capsule recipe and seasonal suggestions to inspire your cooking. We also share tips, techniques, skills, and green inspiration. The muffuletta is an Italian sandwich that originated among the Italian immigrants of New Orleans, it’s a mighty, hefty sandwich that has only has three very important components, bread, a spicy olive salad and Italian charcuterie.

 With Super Bowl coming up next weekend I thought this might be the perfect addition to your game day snacking table, but if not, please keep this in mind for summertime, it’s great for picnics and get-togethers.

 Don’t skimp on quality when making your muffuletta you want to make sure you have the best bread you can find, a round loaf is traditional, along with fresh meats and cheese. For my muffuletta I went with a good salami, some mortadella, a spicy capicollo and a picante provolone, all sliced thin, but feel free to use your favorite cuts.

Everyday Italian Salad

 The main component is really this olive salad, you can either make your own or buy a muffuletta mix from a good Italian deli/store. I do a mixture of both, I buy a mix but add fresh ingredients into mine, but basically the salad consists of, Italian black and green olives, and a giardiniera mix of different veggies. In addition I like to add roasted red peppers and artichoke hearts to mine and always fresh chopped celery, parsley, oregano and good olive oil.

 It’s very simple to make, don’t be intimidated! Slice your round loaf horizontally then pull out some of the dense inside of the bread because you need room for all that filling to fit inside, save those insides for fresh breadcrumbs.

 I like to put the cheese down first over the olive salad, it seems to cover it nicely and gives you a nice base for your layers, then go from there. I added olive salad in between some of my layers but you don’t have to, you can just have it on the top and bottom.

Italian Pasta Salad

 When you’re done layering, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and weigh it down, this is important because it will help distribute all the flavors together nicely. As you can see I used my heavy cast iron pan and added some cans on top to weigh it down even more.

Let it sit for two hours before unwrapping and cutting into it, don’t let it sit overnight because the bread might become soggy from the oils, you want to keep your bread nice and crusty.

 Then cut it into wedges and enjoy! I cut mine quite big for the picture but honestly a small slice is better when serving other things along side it, it’s so densely filled that you couldn’t possibly eat such a huge wedge unless this was your only main course. It’s definitely a show stopper and it also feeds a crowd!

Italian Olive Salad