Salads: The summer staple

Bright and crunchy types of salad make the best side dishes to complement smoky grilled mains, while summer salads with fruit offer a sweet-savoury contrast, the pairing of ingredients has to be precise and perfect for your palette.

From heirloom tomatoes and sweet corn to juicy peaches, spicy radishes, crispy cucumber slices, summers are all about hearty and flavourful salads. “Salads in summer months are absolutely great and easy to make. It ensures hydration in the body which is detoxifying,” says chef Nishant Chaubey.

For most of us, salads mean plenty of protein-packed summer salad recipes with chicken, shrimp, steak, pork, and countless colourful vegetarian options.

Bright and crunchy types of salad make the best side dishes to complement smoky grilled mains, while summer salads with fruit offer a sweet-savoury contrast, the pairing of ingredients has to be precise and perfect for your palette.

Chef Manish Sharma, The Oberoi, says, “Ideally summer salads should be light, refreshing, fruity and healthy. Before making a salad, leafy greens should be soaked in chilled water for some time and then rinsed to remove water, this will make them crunchy and give the texture in salad.”

For most of us, salads mean plenty of protein-packed summer salad recipes with chicken, shrimp, steak, pork, and countless colourful vegetarian options.

Sharma adds, “Popular leafy green available in summer are kale, cos/ romaine, iceberg , baby spinach, arugula and rocket, along with greens we love to add fresh herbs like mint, basil, parsley, dill, they add a different flavour to the salad altogether.”

Chef Varun Inamdar feels it’s important to wash raw vegetables and fruits thoroughly before eating, cutting, blanching or cooking them. He says, “Whether produce is home grown or purchased from the market or it reaches your doorstep as organised by some societies, the produce should be washed. While it is reiterated time and again that Covid does not spread through food produce, it is always advisable to avoid raw vegetables. A quick blanch is always advisable while tossing up a vegetarian salad.”

Chef Manjit Gill advises to never use a knife to cut the greens. He says, “Make sure the greens are torn into bite sized, to get them inside the mouth comfortably and gracefully. Always take a much bigger bowl than the volume of greens to have a fluffy mix of greens. This gives space to dress the salad without splashing or compressing. Larger the bowl, best to toss.”

A quick scroll through the web for popular salad preparations, and you come across the basic iceberg lettuce salads, tongue-tingling Sesame Cucumber Salad, craveworthy Tomato Panzanella that uses sourdough bread instead of greens. For the experimentalists, there is always the off-the-cob corn salad which uses smoky chipotle chile and fresh lime juice to take the preparation up a notch. When it comes to the Summer staple, how can we forget the Greek Salad, which has a brinier flavour, something you don’t want to forget till the onset of winters.

Inamdar says, “ Salads are a large canvas if one knows their craft well. So many ingredients can be built in so beautifully. In fact, most immunity building ingredients can be rustled up into making a dressing - turmeric, black pepper, garlic, ginger, cinnamon stick, citrus fruits, red pepper pulp, spinach, yoghurt, nuts and seeds’ oil, green tea...the list can go on!”

Sharma believes a good dressing always compliments the ingredients and helps in getting the best flavor out of them, adding, “A typical dressing will have 3 parts of oil, you can choose from a variety of oils, extra virgin olive oil, rape seed oil, virgin coconut oil walnut oil or flax seed oil and one part of vinegar ( there are also multiple options from balsamic vinegar, apple cider vinegar or white wine vinegar), to make fruity dressing you can also use fresh orange juice or fresh lemon juice.”

When it comes to salads, the important thing is that the dressing should be fresh. Chaubey says, “Make sure that the leaves or grains are tossed with dressing at the last minute. This would ensure freshness and crispiness. Never cut the fruit and keep it in the fridge as it might oxidize.”

Gill feels a good salad is not a pile of green vegetables with syrupy, thick, viscus, sticky dressing on top. A good salad has dressing mixed all throughout gently, and a measured dressing to the volume of salad. “Salad should never come without dressing at the table. Dressing should be well thick and emulsified,” he adds.

But it’s true that there’s nothing worse than a salad with wilted lettuce or spinach and no crunch factor. With no real need to chew it, it might as well be soup — cold, not-at-all-comforting soup. Inamdar explains, “ Add in some crunchier toppings to camouflage tiny bits of errors like crisp bacon bits, croutons, toasted seeds and nuts, Tortilla chips, fried rice/egg noodles. To Indianise it, add some choicest farsan items like chana dal, moong dal, fryums and everyone’s all time favourite - sev in all its avatars! But, of course, one needs to work according to the recipe.”