How to Prepare Summer Salad
Chef John Simmons

I’m going to make kind of like—it’s kind of like a Bruschetta but I like to add a little cucumber and give it a crunch. So I got chopped tomatoes, I got chopped cucumbers, equal parts so you could kind of vary the recipe. I’m going to add a little bit of salt and this going to take—this going to draw some of the water out of it. You want to make this a little bit ahead to because then all the juices will come out of the tomatoes and the cucumbers and make kind of a nice sauce to it.

I use a Kosher salt, yeah. I like the Kosher salt because its more consist and it’s easier to use. I get some salt, some pepper and a little bit of chopped parsley. I’m going to put a little bit of sugar in there, some extra virgin olive oil. I’m making this like kind of ahead. So this is something that you can even do the day before and put it in the refrigerator. Put a little bit of extra virgin olive oil, any kind of olive oil will do, really any kind of oil.

And I like to use Sherry vinegar. Firstly, my restaurant has a little bit of a Spanish vent to it, although our menu is not strictly Spanish but the Sherry vinegar is nice because its not really too acidic. It’s got a nice fruity flavor. I also like a cider vinegar, it’s good too. It’s kind of mild and it’s got a little bit of more fruit than like your wine vinegars.

Put about two parts to one part, olive oil to vinegar then we’re just going to toss that and put it aside. The most important tool in the kitchen, one that like every single cook uses like the most everyday is spoon, the simplest thing, you see I want to make sure that you taste every single thing as you go along because of one element of the dish is screwed up then its going to destroy everything off.

As good as it got a little bit too much, little too much vinegar so the way you can combat that is to add a little more sugar that takes like the sugar balance as the acid from the vinegar and again like as this sits, the flavors are all going to kind of come together. It’s going to be beautiful and that is our salad. So it’s kind of like little summer salad, kind of a take on a Brushchetta, I threw some of those cucumbers in there and you could see all the juice that came out of those while they were just sitting there for just 15 minutes, that’s the good stuff.

That’s all the olive oil, all the vinegar the juices from the tomatoes and the cucumbers so when we plate this we also brought some little crostinis that I made at the restaurant. These are very simple. I took a regular like French bread loaf, slice them very thin and a little bias, brush them with some olive oil, just put a little bit of parmesan cheese and parsley on them, very simple but I was cooking a lot of them so I made them at the restaurant first but these are going to be nice with the soaking of this nice juices that we got going here.

Then we can garnish them with the croutons, you could scoop up all the juices and soak up the juices with croutons or you can scoop up the chunks. So we got a nice little dish there, very simple ingredients but you can make it look beautiful.