Hearty salad is a balancing act
Cooking is all about balance. Not balance in the sense of juggling a bunch of pans at once (although sometimes that’s true), but the balancing of flavors and textures in a dish. The balancing act is a fundamental skill of any good cook, and learning how to do it is one of the central tenets of my friend Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” (Simon & Schuster). Her book approaches cooking methodologically; its goal is more “teach a man to fish” than it is simply a bucket of fish.
(In fact, Samin originally didn’t want to include recipes at all; I remember a phone call when she told me, with mock outrage, that the editors at Simon & Schuster had the gall to request recipes in her cookbook.)
This week, as I worked on this recipe for a lamb meatball salad, I’ve been thinking a lot about Samin’s book, and her approach to cooking.
I knew the kind of salad I was imagining — a fully loaded one with something in- teresting in each bite. I seasoned some ground lamb with spicy harissa and minced garlic, then rolled the meat into balls, pan-fried them and let them cool slightly. The meatballs are rich; they’d need a bright foil. So instead of salad greens I threw big handfuls of picked herbs — parsley, dill and mint — into the salad bowl.
The salad, with its tender meatballs and soft herbs, needed a crunchy element, so I added some thinly sliced cucumber and radishes, and a handful of toasted sunflower seeds. I tossed it together, then stood there, thinking of my first cooking job working in a cramped catering kitchen when the cooks would offer one another bites of their creations along with the question: “What does it need?”
The salad still needed something creamy. I considered a yogurt dressing, but worried it would cloak the herbs, muting their flavor. So I crumbled in some feta cheese, whisked together a lemony vinaigrette and dressed the whole thing. As a final flourish, I crumbled some toasted slices of lavash — ersatz croutons — over the top.
I’m explaining all this both because I want to offer a glimpse at how I develop recipes, often simultaneously thinking and cooking my way through them, and to give you a greater understanding of the role each ingredient plays in this salad. It’s how I put into practice the balancing act Samin teaches in her book. Part of the beauty of cooking recipes over and over again, is that you eventually have the confidence to make them your own; you understand that you could, say, swap toasted nuts for the sunflower seeds, or vinegar for the lemon juice, or asparagus for the snap peas. Eventually, as Samin hopefully encourages in her book, you’ll no longer need recipes at all.