Perfectly timed for fall’s bountiful harvests, enjoy PLENTY MORE, the hotly anticipated follow-up to London chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s bestselling & award-winning cookbook, PLENTY!
He has shared with us a delectable recipe from his new book: Tomato and Roasted Lemon Salad!
TOMATO AND ROASTED LEMON SALAD
I cooked a recipe similar to this in Sardinia when I shot my Mediterranean Island Feast series last year. I was performing in front of two cameras and our small crew when suddenly a bunch of chirpy Aussie ladies arrived to check into the tiny hotel of my host, Robert Flore, in the remote Monte Ferru mountains. By coincidence, they had come straight from London, which they had visited especially in order to eat in the restaurants of their favorite chef; that chef turned out to be your humble servant. The raucous exhilaration was hard to contain, but it did, I must admit, seriously boost my performance. There’s nothing like a noisy home crowd!
Seek out the sweetest tomatoes you can for this salad in order to balance the bitterness of the lemon. You can bulk it up, as I did in Sardinia, by adding lots more leaves and fresh herbs and some cooked fregola. This will turn the salad into a whole meal. Otherwise, serve it with oven-roasted potatoes or panfried fish.
Serves four
2 medium lemons, halved crosswise, seeds removed, and cut into paper-thin slices (9 oz/260 g)
3 tbsp olive oil
½ tsp superfine sugar
8 sage leaves, finely shredded
22/3 cups/400 g baby tomatoes, yellow or red or a mixture of both, halved
scant ½ tsp ground allspice
1/3 cup/10 g flat-leaf parsley leaves
½ cup/15 g mint leaves
seeds of 1 small pomegranate (2/3 cup/120 g)
1½ tbsp pomegranate molasses
½ small red onion, thinly sliced (about ½ cup/50 g)
salt and black pepper
Preheat the oven to 325ºF/170ºC.
Bring a small saucepan of water to a boil, add the lemon slices, and
blanch for 2 minutes. Drain well, place the lemon in a bowl, and add
1 tablespoon of the oil, ½ teaspoon salt, the sugar, and the sage. Gently mix and then spread the lemon mixture out on a baking sheet lined
with parchment paper. Place in the oven and cook for 20 minutes, until
the lemons have dried out a little. Remove and set aside to cool.
In a bowl, combine the tomatoes, allspice, parsley, mint, pomegranate seeds, pomegranate molasses, onion, the remaining 2 tablespoons oil, ¼ teaspoon salt, and some freshly ground pepper. Add the lemon slices, stir gently, and serve.
