Healthy Rainbow Slaw with a tangy lemon yogurt dressing is made with red and green cabbage, bell peppers, watermelon radishes, jicama, and a touch of jalapeño complements any summer meal ~ it’s cooling, crunchy, and crazy colorful!
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I’m highly recommending this fun rainbow slaw, I brought it to a barbecue yesterday and everybody raved. The bright pink watermelon radish was especially intriguing.
Every batch will be a different color scheme, depending on what you find at your store or farmer’s market! Here’s what I used:
- Cabbage: red for that gorgeous color and Savoy or its wonderful ruffly texture.
- Onion: use red, white, or sweet.
- Jicama: no color, but adds fabulous crunch.
- Watermelon radish: a beautiful pink with a hint of heat.
- Carrots: bonus points if you find multicolored carrots.
- Bell peppers
- jalapeño, optional
Rainbow slaw shredding techniques
I employed a combination of shredding techniques depending on the particular veggies. I used my food processor with the slicing blade for some (red cabbage) and the shredding blade for others (carrots, jicama.) I used a sharp knife to finely shred my Savoy cabbage, watermelon radishes, and peppers. I used my mandoline slicer to get ultra thin slices of onion. You don’t need to use all these methods, a good sharp knife will do the trick for everything too.
My rainbow slaw dressing is a combination of yogurt, buttermilk, lemon, and poppy seeds. It’s skinny, tangy, and delicious. Don’t shy away from the buttermilk in this Spicy Rainbow Slaw, it’s low in fat and packed with tangy flavor.
Sue’s tips for rainbow slaw
➡ Stay away from red beets in this slaw. While they’re delicious and can certainly be shredded and eaten raw, they will bleed their color and turn the salad into a uniform shade of pink. If you want to use beets, use a golden, or chioga variety instead.
➡ Veggies that contain a lot of moisture, like onions or peppers, are better thinly sliced than grated. Grating releases too much water and makes them mushy.
➡ Add a bit of celery seed to the salad for a classic coleslaw flavor.
➡ Coleslaw does fine for a few hours in the refrigerator, in fact it gets better as it sits for a while, allowing the dressing flavors to penetrate the raw veggies.
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Rainbow Slaw
Equipment
- mandoline slicer optional
Ingredients
- red cabbage, thinly sliced
- Savoy cabbage, thinly sliced
- red, white, or sweet onion, thinly sliced
- jicama, finely julienned
- watermelon radish, finely julienned
- carrots, shredded
- red, green, yellow, or orange bell peppers, finely julienned
- 1 jalapeno, minced, seeds and all
- 1 tsp celery seed
Lemon Yogurt Poppy Seed Dressing
- 4 Tbsp Greek yogurt
- 4 Tbsp cultured buttermilk
- juice of 1 lemon
- 1 tsp poppy seeds
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Use whatever combination of veggies you like, to make about 4 cups of slaw. Mix the shredded veggies in a large bowl and toss to combine them.
- Whisk together the dressing and taste to adjust any of the seasonings. Pour on the dressing and toss really well to distribute it. Refrigerate for at least a couple of hours before serving.
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