Salads That Declare Their Independence
By MARK BITTMAN
Meat is not only the centerpiece of most barbecues, but also the
simplest part. Intensely flavorful to begin with, it is easily made
more so with rubs, sauces and smoke.
It's the salads that can be tricky.
With challenge comes opportunity, and anyone willing to explore the
riches of the world beyond coleslaw, potato salad and America's
borders will discover surprising combinations that will be new to
most if not all cookout guests. Like coleslaw and potato salad, most
of these are not "salads" in the sense of a bowl of greens and
dressing, but cold vegetable dishes with both substance and strong
flavor.
The advantages of these dishes, perhaps obvious, are myriad: the
components can almost always be prepared a day or so ahead and
combined at the last minute. The salads are served cold or at room
temperature. They are healthy, or at least perceived as being so.
(Some dressings contain as much fat as a well-marbled steak.) And
they may use ingredients that just don't appear very often in these
forms.
Radish salad, for example, is something you see in various places
around the world (in the last couple of years, I have been served it
in similar guises in both Mexico and Turkey), but almost never in
this country. Salting the radishes first reduces their harshness
while accenting their crispness. At that point, they can be dressed
with a traditional vinaigrette or the more tropical (and oil-less)
version here. The only trick is to slice the radishes thinly. For
this, a mandoline is best.
A mandoline is also useful in preparing Mediterranean leek salad,
which combines a bunch of thinly sliced raw leeks with a quick
vinaigrette and some tomatoes and cucumber. This dish can be made
more elaborate with the addition of a handful of chopped black
olives, either oil-cured or a good variety like calamatas.
Olives are, of course, the star of tapenade, the delicious,
intensely flavored paste that also originated in the Mediterranean
and should be a staple in every household. (Every single time I make
tapenade I wonder how I live without it in my refrigerator.) Combined
with chopped tomatoes and basil, it produces what has to be one of
the best simple summer dishes in existence. The beauty of this dish -
and of the leek salad as well - is that the tomatoes can be the
relatively hard early-summer variety, and it will still be great.
(Later in the summer, layer sliced ripe tomatoes with the tapenade,
rather than tossing them together.)
Half a continent and a world away in flavor from tapenade is the
incredibly rich dairy-based dressing found throughout Eastern Europe,
a creamy mix of yolks from hard-cooked eggs (the whites are used for
garnish), sour cream and lemon. This combination is so full-bodied
that it makes traditional Caesar dressing look thin, so it must be
used with very sturdy greens, the kind that only rarely make their
way into salads. Romaine lettuce is good, especially when mixed with
a variety of bitter greens like endive, escarole, radicchio and
chicory.
Back on the lighter side is classic Japanese eggplant salad, unusual
primarily not for its seasonings (though salads with Asian dressings
still seem exotic to most non-Asians) but for its cooking method.
Though the eggplant should be salted, as usual, if it is not
extremely firm (small ones are almost always better than the common
globular variety), it is cooked swiftly thereafter with a quick
immersion in boiling water. Once the eggplant is tender, it is
chilled, then tossed with a soy sesame dressing.
In general, these salads take as little work as coleslaw and potato
salad, or even less, but are clearly far from common afterthoughts.
In fact, they are so good that they can steal the show: you might
have to start thinking of meat as the side dish.
Tomato and Tapenade Salad
~To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.
-Sugar
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