This 5-Ingredient Summer season Salad Is as Easy as It Will get

May 19, 2025

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Why It Works

Younger, diminutive yellow squash sourced from a farmers market or high quality produce part has skinny skins and dense, tender flesh—excellent for slicing skinny and consuming uncooked in salads.
The goat cheese’s creamy, lactic tang resonates with the easy, citrusy dressing.
Fennel provides a delicate pure sweetness and crisp texture.

I comply with a number of cooks on social media, however a lot of the meals they publish photos of, whereas enjoyable to ogle, would not translate properly for the house prepare dinner. Each on occasion, although, I see one thing that manages to be each fantastically easy and likewise inspiring. A latest instance: I used to be scrolling by way of my Instagram feed and got here throughout a photograph from the Portland, Oregon, chef Jenn Louis of a salad of thinly sliced uncooked yellow summer time squash and fennel, crumbled goat cheese, and dill. I could not shake the thought, so now, as a part of our Best Summer season Ever—a group of seasonal recipes utilizing not more than 4 important components (not together with pantry staples)—I’ve determined to tear it off wholesale.

The one device I might advocate having available for a salad like it is a good mandoline or vegetable slicer, because it makes such simple work of getting these elegant slivers, with constantly excellent outcomes. You’ll be able to try our favourite cheap ones right here.

Apart from that, it is so simple as it sounds. First, get your fingers on some very nice younger and tender summer time squash—you already know, the small ones, not the older, overgrown ones which have huge spongy facilities and harder pores and skin. A farmers market is commonly your finest wager for high quality summer time produce, however some grocers and supermarkets with good produce sections may be a helpful supply. Slice the squash actually thinly on the mandoline, then comply with it with a fennel bulb on the identical thickness setting.

Critical Eats / Vicky Wasik

Add some chopped dill, extra-virgin olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, and provides all of it a very good toss. Then crumble in some recent goat cheese and provides it another very mild toss earlier than serving. (I attempt to decrease how a lot I toss the salad as soon as the goat cheese is added, since I favor that it keep in clumps and never flip right into a milky coating on the whole lot, which might occur in the event you stir a number of moist components repeatedly.)

The completed salad is a mix of tender, crisp, and creamy textures, and candy, aromatic, and tangy flavors—it might be easy, however it tastes refined sufficient to seem on any restaurant menu.

July 2015