BEET AND CITRUS SALAD HOW TO

So she is obsessed with balance, with harmonizing bitter and sweet flavors and ingredients, with making the most of winter fruits that are too often relegated to breakfast and dessert. “I like things when everything tastes integrated,” she says.

Goin believes all ingredients should be mixed with an equal hand, rather than letting greens dominate as they do in other seasons the nuts and pomegranates should rival the arugula in a given bowl.

As a counterpoint to rich entrees, citrus is “bright and not heavy.” “I always want dressings to be juicy,” she says. She uses an abundance of the citrus currently in markets, for instance, but she does not stop with tangerine segments or squeezed blood oranges she uses both the juice and the pulp to get maximum effect.

BEET AND CITRUS SALAD HOW TO

Goin has a whole philosophy of how ingredients should come together, how cravings shift with the seasons and, most important, how to make the most of everything at its peak. I’m a big fruit-and-vegetable fan, and that becomes the focus for me.” “It’s a way of celebrating what’s around now. “My idea of salad in winter is similar to my take on salad in general,” she says. Combinations that would seem polar in summertime are ideal now, and probably no one understands that more vividly than Suzanne Goin of Lucques and A.O.C. Other winter salads are much more season-specific, mingling citrus, pomegranate, dried fruits, nuts and other ingredients that are so essential to a winter larder. You could eat it before a plate of osso buco, or all by itself as supper, and feel equally satisfied. But it really is the ideal winter salad, soothing and warming in the color green. It echoes the quintessential French winter salad with frisee, lardons and poached egg but takes it to another, very Italian level.Ĭesare Casella, the chef-owner who dreamed it up and named it after a favorite Florentine painter, keeps it on the menu year-round. Mingling mellow lettuce with softly scrambled eggs and chunks of pancetta with a whiff of fresh herbs, insalata Pontormo is robust but delicate, filling but still light. THE signature salad at Maremma in New York City is a perfect example. And the element of surprise is never more essential. They are less likely to be a main dish, more likely to be counted on to offset the richness in the rest of the meal. Winter salads carry a different weight from those in other months. What people naturally crave in the coldest months bears about as much resemblance to a salade nicoise as hot chocolate does to a Fudgsicle. And if you can work with what is best and brightest at the farmers market, you will create something even livelier.Īlways, though, salads need to be attuned to appetites. If something is not naturally in peak season, it needs to be tweaked. But after years of reveling in flouting nature, more and more are understanding that salads need to change with the pages on the calendar. Never in all of history have cooks had such easy access to any ingredient at any time of year.

A hand-pounded, bright pesto augments snippings of the fresh herb. The cheese is either a sumptuous, locally made burrata or buffalo bocconcini from Italy. The tomatoes are a special local variety, roasted on the vine to intensify the flavor and juiciness.

Her winter caprese does not rely on pallid, out-of-season tomatoes, rubbery mozzarella and basil leaves with jet lag. When Nancy Silverton spots a caprese salad on a menu in winter, she says, “I don’t stay in that restaurant.” Nothing is a surer sign of seasonal insensitivity than the routine tomato-basil-mozzarella assemblage offered up in months with R in them.īut when Silverton needed a simple salad for the new Pizzeria Mozza, she took that summer standard, winterized it and created a sensation.

Beet and citrus salad