California fattoush salad from Arabiyya

The secret to a good fattoush salad, says chef Reem Assil, is to have an assortment of seasonal elements.

“Anything that you have on hand, you throw that in the salad with the pita chips. And then it all gets brought together with this delicious, tart, pomegranate-based dressing. It’s magical.”

At Reem’s California, Assil’s bakery with locations in Oakland and San Francisco, they switch up the additions, depending on the time of year. They might swap the tomatoes for citrus segments in the winter; add a medley of radishes in the spring; and corn (grilled or raw), pickled cherries or fresh purslane in the summer.

“It’s really fun. We get to play around. We’re like, ‘Okay, let’s do some pickled persimmons.’ And the pomegranate (dressing) just really brings everything together all the time,” says Assil.

As with her California version, fattoush salad is an indicator of place, she adds. “Wherever you go, the fattoush salad is going to taste different. But it’s like a party in your mouth kind of thing.”

Akin to Tuscan panzanella, fattoush turns stale bread into a fresh meal. Among Assil’s earliest food memories is her mother frying leftover pita bread to scatter over bowls of soup or platters of fattoush.

“Fattoush is emblematic of the resourcefulness of Arab cuisine. It’s kind of like the Arab version of the panzanella salad: The idea of taking stale bread and frying it. Reusing scraps of things that you can’t use just shows that we make use of all of our ingredients,” says Assil, laughing.