Little Salad Bar Chef Salad With Chicken and Ham

A chef salad is, in my view, a fundamental salad. A core salad, if you will. If you go to a restaurant and you decide you want to get a salad as your entree, one of the first things you’ll see is a chef salad. You may see other salads, too, but a chef salad is just about a given. Other variations on salads, like a Caesar salad, are variations with respect to the chef salad, which is the baseline.

Webster’s dictionary defines a chef’s salad as “a meal-size salad that includes lettuce, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and julienne strips of meat and cheese.” While not every salad that brands itself a chef salad has all of those things (spoiler alert: the one I’m writing about below doesn’t) there is a still a general set of ingredients that we associate with such a salad.

You can make a chef’s salad yourself — Aldi has the fixings — but if you’re in a hurry, Aldi also has preassembled salad bowls.

One of those, of course, is a chef’s salad.

The Little Salad Bar Chef Salad With Chicken and Ham is an Aldi Regular Buy. You can find it in stores every day. This is situated in the store’s refrigerated. It comes in a 6.7-ounce bowl and, in 2024, costs $2.89, or 43 cents an ounce. It’s currently sold in a mixed case that includes a Caesar salad and a Santa Fe salad.

This is perishable, so make note of the use-by date printed on the top and keep it refrigerated until you prepare it.

Each bowl contains 320 calories, 26 grams of fat (33% of the recommended daily value), 6 grams of saturated fat (30%), and 610 milligrams of sodium (27%). The bowls also have 9 grams of total carbs, 3 grams of fiber, and 4 grams of total sugar. The carbs-to-fiber ratio is 3:1, which is both good and expected for a salad. It does have a lot of fat and sodium, likely on account of both the meat and the salad dressing.

Primary ingredients are Romaine lettuce, homestyle Ranch dressing, Swiss cheese, carrots, chicken breast meat with rib meat, ham with natural juices, and red cabbage. Allergens include egg and milk.

Of note: while egg is an allergen on account of it being in the dressing, this salad does not have hard boiled eggs in it like a traditional chef’s salad does.

It’s not a bad setup inside. You’ve got a bed of lettuce in the bowl, with a package of dressing and a plastic fork nestled in, and in a tray above all that you’ve got everything else.

To prepare the salad, all you have to do is tear open and pour the Ranch, and stir in the toppings. That wasn’t too hard. I will warn, though, that the fork is on the flimsy side, enough that I was afraid stirring my salad too hard would break it. To be fair, with care it got the job done.

As for the salad? It was mostly good. The lettuce was fresh, the carrots crisp, the Ranch flavorful, and the meats and cheese a great accent. If I had any complaint, it was that I needed more Ranch than I got, notwithstanding the fact that it’s a little high in fat as is. Everything else, though, seemed about in the right proportions.

The Verdict:

Quick and easy, this Aldi chef salad is a good choice for a prepackaged lunch salad. It’s got good ingredients and makes for a filling meal. It could probably use a stronger fork and maybe a little more Ranch, but on the whole this is worth a look for the person who needs an easy-to-eat salad.