Sunny Anderson Easy Wedge Salad Is the Perfect Warm-Weather Light Supper

Summer is a great time to enjoy a refreshing, crunchy wedge salad.

And Food Network star Sunny Anderson’s spin on the classic salad is easy, light, and absolutely satisfying for a warm-weather supper. 

Anderson’s Wedge Salad is jazzed up with bacon

The chef’s salad recipe calls for chopped bacon, brown sugar, steak seasoning, balsamic vinegar, hot honey, fresh parsley and thyme, thinly sliced red onion, halved cherry tomatoes, iceberg lettuce cut into four wedges, blue cheese dressing, and crumbled blue cheese.

“It’s my easy Wedge Salad,” Anderson says in the Food Network video, below, for this recipe. “And it’s not just any lettuce. It is the lettuce for a wedge salad, iceberg lettuce.” 

This light supper comes together easily

To start, Anderson explains how to prepare the lettuce for this salad: “I’m making four wedges. Just when you cut it, make sure you go through the base so it stays intact.”

She cuts the lettuce into the four quarters and places them on a platter. 

Anderson sprinkles the bacon with brown sugar and steak seasoning, then bakes it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes until it’s “nice and crispy. … Try hard not to lick your fingers and eat all the bacon before it goes into the salad,” the culinary host quipped. She chops the bacon and sets it aside.

Making the dressing by whisking up balsamic vinegar, hot honey, the fresh thyme, and parsley, Anderson adds sliced red onion, the halved cherry tomatoes and lets it all marinate for about half an hour.

You’ll know the dressing is “ready to go when the tomatoes are kind of a little bit darker in color and these onions are kind of like relaxed and lazy and not so rigid.”

The co-host of Food Network’s The Kitchen pours the dressing over the lettuce wedges, followed by a “store-bought shortcut” blue cheese dressing drizzled over the plated lettuce and dressing. She tops it all off with that sweetened bacon and, because she always finds “there’s not enough blue cheese in my blue cheese dressing,” she adds crumbled blue cheese pieces to accent the flavor of the dressing.

Get the complete recipe, video, and reviews on Food Network’s site.

One reviewer called Anderson’s Wedge Salad ‘perfection’

One of the salad world’s most unassuming and misunderstood items, Wedge Salad can be downright irresistible if it’s done right. And Sunny Anderson does it beautifully, boosting this wedge salad with tons of flavor and texture, according to Food Network reviewers.

“Wow!! We made this tonight and it was perfection! How have I never made bacon this way before tonight I’ll never know but it’s the way to go!,” one home cook wrote.

Another reviewer added, “Easy recipe, taste wonderful! I wasn’t so sure about the bacon but it’s very good. I will be making this again … especially this summer.”