Summer Salad Ideas Perfect for Your Farmers’ Market Haul

There are many reasons summer is for salads, but just to name a few: It’s peak produce season, when fruits and vegetables are brimming with so much flavor it’s sometimes a waste to spend time and energy cooking them. On the hottest days, cool, crisp salads are a godsend (and nobody wants to cook anyway). Tomatoes, cucumber, corn, green beans, peaches, watermelon, cherries — there are so, so many summer fruits and vegetables seemingly designed to salad. And yes, “salad” is a verb.

Learning to Improvise

While Simpson’s wedge salad, with its emulsions and double dressing, might sound fancy, there are some good takeaways for the home cook when thinking about salad composition. When you think about salad as simply a mix of components that play off each other, it can be the ultimate base recipe and offer endless variations. What can’t you put into a salad? For a mix that’s a bit simpler than Simpson’s wedge, try including something roasted, something crunchy, a tart element, a little sweetness, something creamy and maybe a few shaved vegetables. You can save some food from being thrown away, and save some money: I once had a coworker lament that he paid $17 at Sweetgreen for something nearly identical to the use-up-my-leftovers salads I brought from home.

For Maria Zizka, author of 2021’s “One Bowl Meals”, thinking about salads via their components just makes things easier. “Leafy greens can be washed and dried, dressings can be made, nuts and seeds can be toasted, and eggs can be soft-boiled,” she told FoodPrint via email. “A great thing about salads and the other one-bowl meals in my cookbook is that you can prepare the components ahead of time and store them in the fridge, ready to go when you need them.”

A good salad is really all about balance. Zizka suggests using herbs, such as a combination of purple basil, cilantro and mint, dressed with lemon or lime juice, oil and salt, to brighten up heavier salads. And there are ways to prepare ingredients to make them work even better together. Even for his home salads, Simpson pulls out the mandoline to shave all his vegetables down to the same size. “I can bring carrots down to the width of a leaf of lettuce, and the way that eats on a fork is great,” he says. “It’s significant. There’s no disruptive textures in there that really take additional energy or even distract you from the texture of the [lettuce] leaves.”

Fresh and Easy Summer Salads

Summer produce can make for a flavorful salad without much effort. I just got back from a trip to New Orleans, where I ate as many raw Creole tomatoes — an early summer specialty in southern Louisiana — as I could find. They are just the thing to use in a watermelon and tomato salad like Matthew Raiford’s (recipe below), which you can find in his cookbook “Bress ‘n’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer.”

Raiford’s recipes are inspired by his experiences growing up on his family’s farm, living off the bountiful South Carolina land, where food is so fresh it doesn’t need too much to bring out its best. For this salad, he grills the watermelon to add smoke, mixes in microgreens and dresses it all with a tangy sangria vinaigrette.

Summer is an especially great time to incorporate sweeter fruits into your salad game, and watermelon is far from the only option. Zizka and Phyllis Grant (aka @dashandbella) demoed a roasted apricot salad on Instagram Live, mixing the fruit with mustard greens, kalamata olives and shaved Parmesan. “Phyllis’s salad nails the balance of salty, crunchy, and toasty,” Zizka told FoodPrint. “The fruit brings just enough sweetness to the party.”

Recipe: Watermelon Steak Salad with Heirloom Tomatoes and Sangria Vinaigrette

Matthew Raiford and Amy Paige Condon, “Bress ‘n’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer”
Yield: Serves 4 to 6

I grew up eating Georgia Rattlesnake watermelons—that’s really what they’re called, because the dark green stripes resemble a diamondback rattlesnake. These heirloom varietals, which can grow up to 40 pounds, have a deep reddish pink flesh that is sweeter than sweet. Folks started growing them around here in the 1830s. When I was a kid, we’d throw them in the back of the truck and take them to market. Because they are harder to come by now, and because people have grown accustomed to seedless watermelons, I created this recipe to accommodate either. But I absolutely prefer a rattlesnake watermelon, which we grow at Gilliard Farms.

Ingredients

For the salad:

1 to 1 1/2 pounds freshly mixed salad greens or microgreens
1 pound heirloom tomatoes of varying sizes and colors, such as Cherokee Purple, Yellow Brandywine, black and yellow cherry tomatoes
1/4 medium seedless watermelon (5 to 10 pounds)
Olive oil for brushing

For the vinaigrette:

1 cup traditional red sangria, either homemade or store-bought
1/2 cup olive oil
Freshly cracked black pepper
Sea salt

Method

1. Prepare your grill for medium-high direct heat, 375 F to 450 F.
2. While the grill comes up to temperature, wash and dry the salad greens, then divide the greens among four to six serving plates. Wash and dry your tomatoes. Slice the whole tomatoes into ½-inch rounds and halve the cherry tomatoes. Divide and arrange the tomato slices evenly among the plates. Set the plates in the refrigerator to chill while you finish the dish.
3. Slice the watermelon into ¾-to-1-inch-thick “steaks,” then quarter the steaks into wedges. Brush each side of the watermelon with a little olive oil, then set the wedges on the grill for approximately 3 minutes per side, until you get grill marks. The longer you leave the wedges on, the sweeter they’ll get. Remove the watermelon from the grill and arrange evenly among the salad plates.
4. Pour the sangria into a large measuring cup with a pouring spout, then whisk the olive oil into the sangria until it makes a nice, loose vinaigrette. Generously dress the salads. Sprinkle the salads with pepper and salt to your liking, then serve.

Excerpted from “Bress ‘n’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer.” Copyright © 2021 CheFarmer Matthew Raiford and Amy Paige Condon. Photography © 2021 by Siobhán Egan. Reproduced by permission of The Countryman Press, a Division of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.

Recipe: Our Wedge Salad

Jamie Simpson, “The Chef’s Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables” by Farmer Lee Jones with Kristin Donnelly
Yield: Serves 4

We’ve had a lot of fun exploring the fundamentals of a classic wedge salad. You know the one: iceberg lettuce dressed with blue cheese dressing and topped with chopped bacon and black pepper. If you’re lucky, you might even get half a cherry tomato.

Our wedge salad changes daily and represents a walk through the farm. We take a split young head of Merlot romaine (other dense, rigid heads of lettuce work fine) and garnish it with an assortment of shaved vegetables, flowers, and leaves we pick a mere few hours before serving. We encourage you to experiment with the combination of vegetables based on what you find that day. To finish, we dress the lettuce with an herb emulsion, which provides some creaminess, and a kombucha- based granita, for brightness. Crunchy, deeply flavored seed crackers finish the dish. These crackers are easy to make at home and have a long shelf life, but you can often buy similar seedy crackers at cheese shops and specialty markets.

Ingredients

1 cup (240 milliliters) kombucha
2 cups (300 grams) shaved vegetables, such as carrots, asparagus, radishes, cucumbers, rhubarb, sunchokes, beets, or others
2 young heads sturdy lettuce, such as Merlot romaine, halved lengthwise
11/4 cups (300 milliliters) Herb Emulsion*
Flowers and herbs, for garnish
Seedy crackers

Method

1. Pour the kombucha into a shallow baking pan, loaf pan, or ice cube trays. Freeze for at least 4 hours, until firm. Submerge all the shaved vegetables in ice water.
2. Arrange the lettuce halves on a rack set over a rimmed baking sheet lined with parchment paper and dress with some of the herb emulsion. Season with salt.
3. When ready to serve, use a fork to grate the kombucha into the baking pan (or process the ice cubes in a pre-chilled food processor fitted with the chilled grating disk, and store in the freezer until ready to serve.).
4. Arrange the dressed lettuce halves on four plates. Divide the shaved vegetables among the plates. Pick a few blooms and herb leaves, and arrange them on the plates. Set a spoonful of the grated kombucha on top of each. Break a few pieces of the seed crackers into bite-sized pieces and add them to the salads. Serve immediately with more of the emulsion alongside.

*Recipe: Herb or Vegetable-Top Emulsion

Jamie Simpson, “The Chef’s Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables” by Farmer Lee Jones with Kristin Donnelly
Yield: Makes about 3 cups

Whether it’s squash leaves, bean leaves, carrot tops, excess herbs, or another leafy green, this emulsion allows you to turn those leaves that might otherwise get discarded into a smooth sauce. This basic emulsion serves as one of our mother sauces at the Culinary Vegetable Institute; we use it in salads, seafood dishes, and hot grains or warm vegetable appetizers. If you have a ton of herbs, you can make an herb oil first as a substitute for the sunflower oil, further fortifying the emulsion with flavor.

Ingredients

8 ounces (225 grams) herbs or vegetable tops, including stems
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon
(20 milliliters) Dijon mustard
½ cup (120 milliliters) ice water
1 tablespoon (15 grams) kosher salt, plus more to taste
2 cups (480 milliliters) sunflower oil

Method

1. Set a bowl of some ice water near the stove. In a pot of boiling salted water, blanch the herb leaves for about 20 seconds, until wilted. Transfer to the ice bath and let cool. Remove the herbs from the ice bath and squeeze out all excess water, then roughly chop.
2. In a blender, combine the mustard, ice water, salt, and wilted leaves and blend on high speed until smooth. Scrape down the sides of the pitcher, then blend again until smooth. Ensure the puree doesn’t get hot. With the blender now on medium speed, gradually add the oil. If the spinning slows or stops, increase the speed slightly to get it going again.
3. Strain the emulsion through a fine-mesh strainer into a storage container. Taste and season with more salt, if desired. The emulsion will keep, refrigerated, for up to 1 week.

NOTE: Just before serving, you can brighten the flavor of the emulsion with a splash of citrus juice or vinegar, or some chopped pickles. Don’t add the acidity too far in because it turns the emulsion brown over time.

Exceprted from “The Chef’s Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables” by Farmer Lee Jones with Kristin Donnelly; published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by The Chef’s Garden, Inc.

Top Photo by Yossey Arefi.