The sun is beaming, cicadas are chirping and the air conditioning is on full blast. What better than a fresh salad to sit amid the holiday spread?

While beautiful in theory, when it comes down to it, salad is often the bottom of the Christmas food hierarchy, resulting in a slap-dash selection of soggy, underseasoned leaves.

The recipes we’ve chosen range in prep time but all offer something special – hot, cold, creamy, tangy – qualities guests may not expect. Some shine as a main dish while others work well as a supporting character to ham, turkey or other festive proteins. A few are also able to be easily assembled upon arrival if you’re not hosting.

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Sharpen your knives, and keep your fingers and thumbs tucked away, it’s chopping time. There are five ingredients – onion, celery, capsicum, tomatoes and olives – that need to be finely chopped, which can make this a tedious task. But all is worth it when every bite has a little piece of everything. Thankfully the dressing is a simple lemon, olive oil combo. For a little crunch at the end throw in your favourite toasted nuts or seeds. This keeps up to four days in the fridge.

José Pizarro’s warm green bean salad with crispy jamón and mahón. Photograph: Ola O Smit/The Guardian

Warm salads feel wrong – is it really OK to call anything that’s not chill a salad? But here higher temperature enhances the flavours of the produce, with warm blanched green beans easily absorbing the cider-vinegar dressing. You’ll need to head to a specialty cheese shop for the mahón, or you could substitute with more easily available gouda or manchego instead. There’s jamón already in the salad but for Christmas you could try taking it out, as the rest of the salad will make an excellent accompaniment for ham.

Alice Zaslavski’s strawberry stracciatella. Photograph: Eugene Hyland/The Guardian

Tomatoes and strawberries share similar flavour compounds, so the berry plus stracciatella is a fine combo – though if stracciatella is hard to find, Zaslavsky recommends using burrata. The dressing of maple syrup, orange and star anise has an undeniable Christmas-y flavour, so make sure you let the strawberries macerate overnight for maximum impact. Before finishing the dish with a generous glug of the dressing, don’t forget to take out the star anise, which would make for an unfortunate festive surprise.

Tom Hunt’s green goddess salad. Photograph: Tom Hunt/The Guardian

Although green goddess salad peaked in 2022, its exit from the trend cycle doesn’t stop it being delicious. The beauty of the dressing is that it’s made up of bits you would normally throw away: herbs stalks and the woody ends of asparagus. The rest of the recipe is adaptable too. Any fruit or vegetable, as long as it’s green, is fair game.

Meera Sodha’s roast cauliflower and kimchi couscous salad. Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian

An ideal bring-a-plate, the fiddliest part of this salad is roasting the vegetables. While Sodha describes it as a “winter” salad, cauliflower is cheap and plentiful this month in Australia, so it can do well on the Christmas table too. You can swap out roast veg for whatever is looking good in the produce aisle – eggplant or broccoli would both work. While this recipe calls for the salad to be divided between four bowls, for a festive spread you can bring the components separately then pile the salad into a large platter, blob artfully with hummus and kimchi, and decorate with pumpkin seeds.

Yotam Ottolenghi’s beetroot pkhali with marinated beetroot and olive salsa. Photograph: Louise Hagger/The Guardian

Pkhali is a Georgian vegetable spread-dip-salad hybrid made with a variety of vegetables – beetroot, spinach, eggplant – and walnuts. Beets are bountiful this month so you’ll be set with the kilogram required for this recipe. After an hour in the oven they’re used in two different components: coarsely grated for the pkhali and cut into wedges and marinated. Start this recipe two days ahead of time, as “the flavours only deepen with time”, Ottolenghi writes. Also good to know: this salad is vegan.

Thomasina Miers’ cold noodle salad with herbs, mango, peanuts and prawns. Photograph: Kim Lightbody/The Guardian

Mangoes, prawns – this salad is peak Australian Christmas. Green-variety falan mangoes would work well here and, where the recipe asks for rice noodles, look for dried “rice stick noodles” in supermarkets and Asian grocers. For sustainable shellfish, GoodFish recommends Australian farmed (rather than wild-caught) prawns. Buy them whole if peeling prawns is your love language.

Kyu Jeong Jeon and Duncan Robertson’s asparagus salad with mashed tofu and pine nut dressing. Photograph: Emma Guscott/The Guardian

This recipe was originally paired with a Korean mackerel dish but it’s subtle, slightly nutty flavours could work well if your Christmas spread includes an oily fish, like trout or salmon. Timing is important: the tofu needs to be very dry to incorporate into the dressing so make sure you’ve allotted enough time to press out the moisture, and don’t overcook the asparagus – you want them to have a little bite. The best bit? The smell of the toasted pine nuts adds to the holiday atmosphere.

Rukmini Iyer’s chaat masala with spiced watermelon, tomato and cucumber salad. Photograph: Lizzie Mayson/The Guardian

Fruit, but make it cool, crunchy and zesty with a secret ingredient: chaat masala. The tangy spice blend is a staple in Indian street snacks and you can find it in south Asian grocery stores. This salad is extremely easy to make and travels well as you can cut and refrigerate the produce ahead of time. When you’re ready to serve, gently stir through the chaat masala, lime, sugar and salt, and scatter with peanuts.