Sweet 'N' Spicy Asian Salad with Peanut Sauce (2024)

This Sweet ‘N’ Spicy Asian Salad with Peanut Sauce is incredibly rich in flavor, easy ingredients and takes just 15 minutes to make!

This is a recipe I adapted from my mother. During my pregnancy (10 months ago) and the couple months following my daughter’s birth, I consumed a lot of it. I’ve never been huge on Asian flavors, except for the usual fried rice, but this sauce is just heavenly. It’s sweet, spicy and creamy. It’s ready in 15 minutes too! The sauce is healthy in the sense of the fairly healthy ingredients, but there is some fat in it from the peanut butter and peanut oil…so go easy when drizzling the sauce. 🙂 It’s so good though, I’ve been known to eat a couple spoonfuls by itself. I even ate it at Thanksgiving!

I just made a couple of changes to adapt to my liking. The original recipe calls for shredded chicken and brown sugar. I omit the chicken and swap out the brown sugar for coconut sugar.

It’s a beautiful and filling salad because the sauce is no wimpy sauce!

This Sweet and Spicy Asian Salad with Peanut Sauce uses the following easy ingredients:

• 1/2 cup quality peanut oil
• 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons all natural organic creamy peanut butter (no added sugars or oils, mine only has salt)
• 1/4 cup rice vinegar
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce (or Bragg’s liquid aminos or tamari)
• 4 teaspoons coconut sugar (or brown sugar or your preferred sweetener)
• 2 teaspoons peeled minced fresh ginger
• 2 teaspoons hot pepper paste
• 1 large bag of mixed field greens
• 1 red bell pepper sliced
• 1 green bell pepper sliced
• 1 carrot shredded

Tip: Do not use a poor quality peanut oil. I’m telling you, it makes a HUGE difference. I tried using an inexpensive brand and it was terrible. A quality peanut oil will overwhelm you (in a good way) with a deep roasted peanut smell. I use Spectrum brand. I found mine at HEB but I’m sure they sell it at most grocery stores.

This is incredibly fast and easy to make, requiring just 15 minutes. Prepare all the vegetables and add them to a large bowl. Add all the sauce ingredients to a small bowl and whisk until smooth and emulsified and thick. (the more you whisk, the thicker it becomes) If you are serving the whole bowl at once, you can drizzle the sauce over the whole salad. However, it’s a lot of sauce, so I just poured the sauce on individual plates and stored the leftovers in the fridge. Enjoy! You can thank me…and my mom…for this one. 🙂

Update: This is a recipe from 2012 and I no longer use oil in my recipes. See the updated oil-free version here!