New Jersey · Salad
Jersey Tomato Salad
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, with warmth in the tail.
Ingredients
- 1kg ripe Jersey tomatoes, in thick slices
- 1 red onion, sliced thin
- Fresh basil leaves, torn
- 4 tbsp good olive oil
- 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
- Flaky salt and coarse black pepper
- Crusty bread
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Slice the tomatoes thick and lay them on a platter in a single overlapping layer.
- Salt them and let them sit 10 min: the juices that come out are the dressing. 10 min
- Scatter the onion and basil over.
- Dress with olive oil and just enough vinegar to sharpen; the tomatoes bring their own acid.
- Grind pepper over and serve with bread to mop the plate.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Salting to draw the water out 41 recipes
- Salted evenly over every surface rather than tipped on in one place and tossed once.
- Laid out so the water has somewhere to go: a colander, a rack, or a sieve over a bowl, never a flat dish where it sits back in what it gave up.
- Given real time, and there is visible liquid to show for it: a pool underneath, a drip, or a wrung handful.
- That liquid is removed. It is squeezed, blotted or poured away, and the food is dry to the touch before it goes anywhere near heat.
- The dish is seasoned knowing salt has already gone on, tasted before any more is added.
Where it goes wrong It went into the dish still wet, and was salted again out of habit. The water it was carrying dilutes and steams whatever it meets, so the result is watery and over-seasoned at once, and those are two faults that cannot be corrected in the same direction.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chianti Classico or Barbera d’Alba
- Also Right
- Vermentino for the lighter plates
- From the Taps
- Italian pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- San Pellegrino Sanbittèr
Tomato’s acid demands equal acid: Italian reds evolved beside the sauce, and the regional pairing is the safest law in wine.
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