There are so many ways to serve this easy Garden Tomato Salad.

As a side salad: The easiest way is to serve this is just as a side salad. Just dish it out in small bowls and serve it alongside your dinner.

As an appetizer: You can serve this Garden Tomato Salad as an appetizer. Put the tomato salad in a bowl in the middle of a serving tray. Cut up a loaf of Italian bread and place it outside of the bowl on the serving tray. Encourage your eaters to dip the bread into the salad to get some of the delicious tomatoes and “juice” in a single bite.

As a topping: If you are making something simple, like baked chicken, grilled steak, or a pork cutlet, you can top them with this Garden Tomato Salad. Make your salad the night before, then cook your protein fresh. Right before you serve dinner, top the protein with the tomato salad.

Fresh basil works really well in this salad. If you don’t have any, you could use fresh parsley instead. Oregano would work in a pinch, although I personally think it’s a little too strong of a taste to go with this light of a salad.

If you don’t have fresh herbs, you can substitute an equal amount of dried herbs. Fresh tastes best, but dried herbs are better than no herbs.

The name of this is “Garden Tomato Salad,” so the obvious answer would be that garden tomatoes are best in this salad.

Personally, we are growing Whopper tomatoes, so that’s what’s in the photos in this post. But this recipe is great with any type of tomato.

Roma tomatoes, better boy tomatoes, or beefsteak tomatoes would be really good for this. Roma are a little on the “wetter” side when you cut them, so be sure to keep that in mind. If you use those, the salad will be good, but it will be a little more liquid-y than if you use beefsteak tomatoes.

My mom uses cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes when she makes this tomato salad because they’re simple to just cut in half instead of cutting into multiple pieces like this recipe calls for.

Storing leftover Garden Tomato Salad is really simple. Since you’re already making this in an air tight container, just stick the lid on the salad and store leftovers in the fridge.

Leftover tomato salad will be good for two or so days in the fridge. After that, the olive oil starts to solidify, which results in it getting thick and clumpy and it just sits on top of the liquid. It’s not great and no one wants to eat that. So be sure to eat the leftover salad as quickly as possible to avoid that.

The beauty of this salad is that you need to make it ahead of time so that the flavors gel together.

But, you just have to make sure to not make it too much ahead of time. You want to avoid the aforementioned solidifying of the oil.

You can make the salad anywhere between a few hours ahead of time up to the night before. Anything longer than that isn’t ideal.