By Susan Semenak, Montreal Gazette
Summer and salad are words that go together. But what to do when there are no tomatoes to pluck from the garden and the only lettuce in sight came from a greenhouse or a field a thousand miles away?
Time to conjure a different kind of salad: one that replaces delicate lettuce leaves with hardy bitter greens and marries them with an assortment of nuts, seeds and fruits dazzling and aromatic enough to upstage the salad days of summer.
The winter salad may not be fresh and spontaneous the way its summer cousins are. Instead, it is a many-layered creation with bold flavours, bright colours and interesting textures. A study in contrasts.
Picture, for instance, a plate of reddish-purple radicchio and green arugula tossed with a Dijon-mustard vinaigrette and garnished with toasted hazelnuts and dried cherries. Or a bowl of frizzy Niçoise, or curly endive as it is also known, studded with pomegranate seeds and topped with rounds of soft, melty goat cheese.
It all starts with the greens. While summer lettuces are delicate and mild, winter greens tend toward bitter and nutty in taste and cabbagy, bristly or curly in texture. Think buttery-yellow endives, pale green Niçoise, raging purple radicchio. On their own they taste bitter, but paired with elements from other flavour groups they are exciting and inviting to the tastebuds.
Segments of ruby red grapefruit or Cara Cara oranges or Sicilian blood oranges inject jewel tones and sour notes to salads. [manyakotic/Fotolia]
Offset their bitterness with a hint of sweetness in the form of berries, sliced apple or pears or dried fruits. Roasted root vegetables add a subtler sweetness, but also another, softer, dimension. Consider wedges of roasted sweet potato or cubes of butternut or acorn squash scattered on toasted nuts or seeds for crunchiness.
To make a winter salad into a meal, top it with sliced salmon or cooked chicken or cheese, even hard-boiled eggs or cooked whole grains, like farro, wheat berries or barley.
Winter salads demand their own vinaigrettes, too. To stand up to the bolder flavours and textures of the leaves, cold-weather dressings should be more robust. They rely on good-quality red-wine or apple-cider vinegar used more liberally than in summer. And they are sometimes further emboldened by the addition of mashed anchovy filets, capers or Dijon mustard, as well as such freshly ground toasted spices as cardamom or coriander.
I’ve learned a few lessons from the late, great San Francisco restaurant chef and cookbook author Judy Rodgers, who was a champion of salads that broke out of the “repetitive hodgepodge of greens and familiar vegetables” as she put it in The Zuni Café Cookbook (Norton), published in 2002.
Just reading the names of some of her glorious winter salads is inspiring: Bosc Pears with Fennel, Walnuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano and Balsamic Vinegar; Radicchio, Onions and Portobello Mushrooms and a Deep-fried Egg; Endive and Fuyu Persimmon Salad with Pecans.
You don’t need a recipe to compose a beautiful winter salad. Be creative. Have fun. Mix and match from the following groups.
THE GREENS
And reds and purples. Winter salads start with sturdy leaves like escarole, radicchio, Belgian endive, arugula, spinach, even whole fresh parsley leaves. They are crisp and often mildly or boldly bitter and sometimes nutty, which makes them the perfect foil for punchy vinaigrettes.
Go further afield and add loose leaves from Brussels sprouts or ultrathin slices of red cabbage or napa cabbage cut on a mandoline. Use kale, too. To make it more tender, cut out the tough stalk in the middle and roll the leaves up tightly, then cut them into very thin strips called chiffonade. Or chop them more coarsely and massage in the dressing with your hands to tenderize.
Don’t stop there: Add shaved raw fennel or very thin, diagonally cut celery slices.
From A Boat, a Whale and a Walrus: celery root and celery leaf salad uses winter vegetables to full advantage; pomegranate seeds add a flash of colour. [Jim Henkens/Sasquatch Books]
FRUIT
It’s the sweet note. Winter calls for citrus. Segments of ruby red grapefruit or Cara Cara oranges or Sicilian blood oranges inject jewel tones and sour notes to salads. But slices of silky ripe Bosc or Barlett pear or crisp Gala apples are nice, too (but don’t cut them up until the last minute to prevent browning). Persimmons are also beautiful (look for the firmer Fuyu variety); so are ruby-red pomegranate seeds.
Dried fruits like cranberries, blueberries and cherries are sweet-tart nuggets that add colour and texture. Mejdool dates are almost creamy and very sweet and so are pitted prunes and dried apricots. Plump raisins up in warm water or port wine and add them to salad for a nice chewiness.
NUTS AND SEEDS
The crunch factor comes from such nuts as almonds, pine nuts, pecans, walnuts, pistachios and hazelnuts. To use them to best effect, toast them first. (Do this on the stovetop in a heavy, unoiled fry pan over medium high heat. It will only take a few minutes. Or lay them out on a small baking sheet and warm them in a 350 degree oven for five minutes or so. Watch them, though — they go from golden to burnt in an instant.)
Use the nuts whole, halved, slivered or coarsely chopped.
CHEESE
Many cheeses add a salty, creamy dimension to winter salad. Parmigiano Reggiano shaved into wide curls with a cheese planer or paring knife pairs well with arugula and radicchio. Blue cheese and sliced ripe pear is a match made in heaven. And goat cheese rolled in finely chopped hazelnuts or herbed breadcrumbs and then sliced into discs and warmed in the oven on a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet for just a few minutes is a perfect winter salad topping. Chill the cheese rounds in the fridge before baking so they don’t spread out as they heat. You can also brown them in a frying pan coated with olive oil over medium-high heat — a few minutes on each side until crispy and golden but not melted.
THE DRESSING
Try walnut or hazelnut oil in winter-salad dressings for a hint of nuttiness that echoes the flavour of the nuts tossed into the salad.
Play with vinegars, too. Try sherry vinegar or good-quality apple cider vinegar or fruit-flavoured vinegars. For fragrance, add freshly ground toasted spices like coriander or fennel to the dressing. For brightness, try finely grated lemon or orange zest.
I really like Mark Bittman’s Walnut Vinaigrette recipe from How to Cook Everything (Wiley). It calls for 1/4 cup sherry, balsamic or good-quality red wine vinegar; 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard; 1/2 cup of walnut oil; 2 teaspoons minced shallots and freshly ground black pepper. He mixes the first three ingredients with a hand-held immersion blender for extra creaminess and then slowly adds the oil and then the shallot and pepper.
RECIPES
Hearty greens, toasted nuts, jewel-coloured fruit: these are elements of a sublime winter salad. Here are a few tried-and-true recipes to add some colour and crunch to your mid-winter salad plate.
BABY SPINACH SALAD WITH DATES AND ALMONDS
Serves 4
Never have I tasted a salad so multi-faceted, so infused with flavour and texture as this one, which is adapted from Jerusalem, the cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi (Random House). It features crispy pita croutons, dates and whole almonds.
You can prepare the components in advance and toss them together with the spinach at the last minute. I have made it with and without the butter; both ways are fine. Don’t make this without the sumac, which adds a nice tangy note. You can find it at spice shops and Middle Eastern and Iranian grocery stores.
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
½ medium red onion, thinly sliced
3 1/2 ounces (a generous handful) pitted Mejdool dates, cut in half
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 small pitas, roughly torn into 1-½ inch pieces
½ cup whole unsalted almonds, very coarsely chopped
2 teaspoons sumac
½ teaspoon chili flakes
4 to 5 cups baby spinach leaves
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
Salt
Put the vinegar, onion and dates in a small bowl. Add a pinch of salt and mix well with your hands. Leave to marinate for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, heat the butter and oil in a medium frying pan over medium heat. Add the pita and almonds and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring all the time, until the pita is crunchy and golden brown. Remove from the heat and mix in the sumac, chili flakes and ¼ teaspoon salt. Set aside to cool.
When you are ready to serve, toss the spinach leaves with the pita-almond mix in a large bowl. Add the dates and red onion, the remaining olive oil, the lemon juice and another pinch of salt. Taste for seasoning and serve immediately.
***
Here’s another robust salad, perfect for winter, from the cookbook Jerusalem. It gets its green from whole parsley leaves and a flash of red from pomegranate seeds.
ROASTED CAULIFLOWER AND HAZELNUT SALAD
Roasting cauliflower gives it a nutty sweetness. In this winter salad it pairs with toasted hazelnuts and pomegranate seeds, with celery leaves and parsley standing in for lettuce. [Jonathan Lovekin/Appetite by Random House]
Serves 2 to 4
1 head cauliflower, broken into small florets
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 large celery stalk, cut into diagonal ¼-inch-thick slices
5 tablespoons hazelnuts, with skins
1/3 cup small flat-leaf parsley leaves
1/3 cup pomegranate seeds (from about half a medium pomegranate)
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons maple syrup
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
Mix the cauliflower with 3 tablespoons of the olive oil, ½ teaspoon salt and some black pepper. Spread out in a roasting pan and roast on the top oven rack for 25 to 35 minutes, until the cauliflower is crisp and parts of it have turned golden brown. Transfer to a large mixing bowl and set aside to cool.
Decrease the oven temperature to 325 degrees F. Spread the hazelnuts out on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and roast for 17 minutes, until they are golden brown.
Allow the nuts to cool a little, then coarsely chop them and add to the cauliflower along with the remaining oil and the rest of the ingredients. Stir, taste and season with salt and pepper, accordingly.
Serve at room temperature.
***
There’s no more popular winter green these days than kale. But its thick leaves need special treatment to tenderize them. This recipe adapted from the cookbook A Boat A Whale and A Walrus, by the inventive Seattle chef Renee Erickson (Sasquatch Books), makes eating kale anything but earnest.
For best results let the kale marinate for at least an hour (or as long as overnight) so that it is partly wilted. For a variety with softer leaves, look to lacinato, or Tuscan kale with its long dark green leaves. To plump up the raisins, soak them in hot water for 10 minutes or so and then drain them. And use a potato peeler to shave the Pecorino Romano cheese into thin ribbons.
MARINATED KALE SALAD
Serves 2 to 4
¾ pound bunch lacinato or green kale
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt
3 tablespoons toasted pine nuts
¼ cup golden raisins
¼ cup shaved Pecorino Romano cheese
Remove the ribs from the kale and chop into bite-size pieces, removing all the tough bits. Dress with lemon juice, olive oil and salt and let sit at room temperature for 1 to 2 hours, or in the refrigerator overnight, until the kale begins to wilt.
Serve with toasted pine nuts, raisins and shaved Pecorino Romano cheese.
***
Bright orange persimmons are jewels of winter. Choose the firmer, rounder Fuyu persimmons for this salad (not the torpedo shaped Hachiya persimmons that are only edible when they get jelly-soft.)
In this simple salad, taken from the late, legendary San Francisco chef Judy Rodger’s The Zuni Café Cookbook (Norton), persimmons are the sweet counterpoint to endive’s bitter note. “Rich, slippery, fleshy,” is how Rodgers herself described it. The optional addition of watercress adds a crunchy, peppery dimension. Don’t make this in advance; endive tends to discolour after it is cut.
PERSIMMON SALAD WITH ENDIVES
Persimmons are a sweet, beautiful addition to winter salads. [Fotolia]
Serves 4
About 24 pecan halves (1/3 cup)
About 1 pound endive (roughly 4 heads), chilled
1 large or 2 small Fuyu persimmons, chilled
About 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
About 1 tablespoon Champagne vinegar or white wine vinegar
Salt
A few sprigs of watercress (optional)
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Warm the pecans on a small baking sheet for about 4 minutes, just to heighten their flavour. Let them cool, then break along the natural folds into large pieces.
Remove or trim any damaged outer leaves from the endive. Rinse, dry and then slice each endive head on a steep angle into long pointy pieces. Work your way down to the solid core and discard it.
Use the tip of a paring knife to carve out the stem end of the persimmons, then remove a thin wedge and taste. If the skin is tender and you like it, leave it on; otherwise peel with a vegetable peeler. Cut the persimmons into ¼-inch-thick wedges.
Combine the oil, vinegar and salt to taste. This vinaigrette should be mild.
Gently toss the endive, persimmons and pecans in the vinaigrette to coat well. Separate any leaves of endive that remain sandwiched together. Taste and serve immediately.