Cantaloupe melon fattoush — a Ravinder Bhogal recipe

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Before Claudia Roden’s seminal cookbooks, salad in England was mostly drab — a mound of wilting lettuce, a meagre few slices of mute tomatoes and cucumbers.

But a salad bowl begs to be filled with abundance, freshness, flavour and textural contrast. Fattoush, for instance, is vibrant. It’s a sort of Levantine panzanella that showcases the bite of fresh vegetables, the plush soft flesh of ripe tomatoes and the crunch of fried flatbread. There are many versions of it, but each of them calls for a smattering of assertively sour sumac — a dark red powder that comes from ground berries. It’s simply not fattoush without it, and it’s this which makes it so addictive.

You can use any salad ingredients you have lying around — there are no hard and fast rules. I like to toss together radishes, tomatoes and Persian cucumbers, which I pick up at the local Turkish grocers an hour before I want to eat, so that their fresh flavours and juices mingle. I add the herbs, a generous amount of fried flatbread and dressing just before I serve. If you are health-conscious, you can pop the bread in a toaster and heat till it crisps up, but I like deep-frying it whole or halved and then shattering it into irregular shards.

My version here uses a cantaloupe melon, a fruit that has been left in the shade by big-bellied watermelons, especially when it comes to salad. But when you have one that is beautifully ripe, as they should be right now, its ambrosial lusciousness plays nicely with the mouth-puckering sharpness of sumac. This is the salad you will want to make all summer.

Cantaloupe melon fattoush

Serves 4

1. Heat the sunflower oil in a saucepan over a medium heat. When hot, add half the Lebanese bread and fry until golden, then drain on absorbent paper. Repeat with the remaining bread.

2. In a bowl, make the dressing by combining the lemon juice with a fat pinch of salt, a good grind of black pepper and a quarter-teaspoon of the sumac, and whisking in the olive oil. Set aside.

3. Combine the cherry tomatoes, cucumber and radishes, season with sea salt and set aside for 20 minutes. When you are ready to serve, add the mint and parsley to the tomato mixture. Break the fried bread into rough pieces and toss with the vegetables. Pour over three-quarters of the dressing.

4. Transfer to a platter and top with slices of melon. Pour over remaining dressing and sprinkle over remaining sumac. Serve immediately.

Ravinder Bhogal is chef-patron of Jikoni. Follow Ravinder on Instagram @cookinboots and Twitter @cookinboots

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