TL;DR (Quick-Answer Box)
- What it is: A crisp, elegant salad featuring Belgian endive, frisée, sliced pears, and toasted walnuts, all tossed in a savory mustard and garlic vinaigrette with crumbled blue cheese.
- Why you’ll love it: It’s a sophisticated, restaurant-quality side or light lunch that hits every flavor note—bitter, sweet, salty, and earthy—in just 20 minutes.
- How to make it: Roast walnuts until fragrant. Slice pears and toss with greens. Whisk a handmade garlic-mustard paste with lemon and oil, drizzle over, and serve immediately.
Jump To
Endive, blue cheese, and pear salad is an elegant and easy approach to eating healthfully without having it seem like penance. Quite the contrary. The melding of sweet and savory and salty and slightly tangy will have everyone complimenting you and clamoring for more.
Want to save this?
I'll email this to you, so you can come back to it later. Booyah!
More healthy green salad recipes
Endive Roquefort Salad
20 mins
Rainbow Chard Salad
30 mins
Cilantro Kale Salad
20 mins
Little Gem Salad
20 mins
Write a review
If you make this endive salad recipe, or any dish on LC, consider leaving a review, a star rating, and your best photo in the comments below. I love hearing from you.–David
Endive, Blue Cheese, and Pear Salad
Ingredients
For the salad
- 1 cup walnuts
- One (5-oz) Corella, Williams or Bartlett pear
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- 2 Belgian endive (yellow or red variety), leaves separated
- 1/4 head frisée, torn into pieces
- 7 ounces Roquefort, Gorgonzola, or other blue cheese
For the vinaigrette
- 1 medium garlic clove, crushed and peeled
- 1/2 teaspoon coarse sea salt
- 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- 1/4 cup olive oil
Instructions
Make the salad
- Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C).
- Place the walnuts on a rimmed baking sheet and roast until fragrant, 5 to 8 minutes. Keep careful watch as the walnuts go from not quite done to scorched quite quickly. Transfer the walnuts to a plate to cool.
- Thinly slice the pear and toss it with the lemon juice in a salad bowl. Add the walnuts, endive, and frisée. Crumble the blue cheese over the top.
Make the vinaigrette
- Using the back of a chef’s knife, mash the garlic and coarse salt into a paste. (You can also do this with a mortar and pestle.) Add the garlic paste, mustard, and lemon juice to a bowl and whisk until combined. Whisk in the olive oil in a thin stream until the dressing thickens and emulsifies.
Assemble the salad
- Drizzle the vinaigrette over the salad and gently toss to coat. Serve immediately.
Explore More with AI
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
Recipe Testers’ Reviews
Did you know only 68% of the recipes we test make it onto the site? This recipe survived our rigorous blind testing process by multiple home cooks. It earned the Leite’s Culinaria stamp of approval—and the testers’ reviews below prove it.
This elegant recipe had all the elements I think make up a perfect salad: a mixture of tasty greens, a tangy dressing, sweet fruit, creamy cheese, and the buttery crunch of nuts. Salads designed around those tastes and textures, to me, are always a hit. Keeping those elements in mind when you’re designing a menu makes the possibilities for salad combinations endless!
If it’s summer, use fresh berries, check to see what cheese you’ve got in the fridge, what nuts are in the pantry, and so on. But back to the recipe at hand! I used a combination of yellow endive and curly endive for the greens. I had some crumbled Gorgonzola in the fridge and walnuts in the pantry, and the pear variety I used was a ripe, yellow Bartlett.
I actually didn’t whisk in the oil as the recipe said; I put everything in a Mason jar and shook it until it emulsified, which took about 30 seconds. Overall, it’s a lovely salad that I think’d be wonderful with some radicchio as well—and if you couldn’t find ripe pears, I could see the elements working well with dried figs swapped in instead.
Full of familiar flavor combinations, this endive, blue cheese, and pear salad is an easy win. Blue cheese and pears match well together and provide a nice sweet to contrast to the slight bitterness of the endive and frisée. The walnuts add a crunch, but the real star is the dressing. The bite of the garlic and lightness of the dressing just ties the whole salad together. I used Gorgonzola dolce because I love the softness and sweetness of this cheese with pears and walnuts.
Take some lovely ingredients, put them together, and get a salad that’s oh-so-much better than the sum of its parts. I love the combination of pears and blue cheese, so this was a no-brainer for me to make. The frisée I bought was quite bitter, but the sweetness of the pear offset it beautifully.
I love a vinaigrette that’s made with lemon juice like this one, and it was perfect to dress the ingredients as it added a brightness to the salad. Everything fits together beautifully. The different textures—soft, crispy, crunchy, creamy—and, if you time it right, served when the walnuts are still warm, you’ve got an added bonus in the different temperatures.
This recipe’s one that I’ll make again for us to enjoy, and it’ll be impressive as something to serve for company. I find that pasting garlic on a cutting board—by crushing the clove(s) of garlic, sprinkling the salt on top, and then working the salt into the garlic—works much better for me than trying to smush it together in a bowl with the back of a spoon.
