Smoked salmon and melon salad

A new salad recipe?

I don’t really like those salad recipes where they put together a couple of obvious ingredients with the third maybe slightly an unusual combination, and try to impress.

For instance, a perfectly common tomato and cucumber Greek-style salad, but pomegranate seeds are scattered on top, so it’s a 'new' recipe. It’s not, it’s a Greek salad with random pomegranate seeds. Have you ever seen a Greek put pomegranate into their salad? No, they have different applications for the purple jewels.

Classic salads are the best

Classic salad combinations have been tried and tested and the reason they are classic is precisely because they are good combinations. I don’t deny there are new, fantastic discoveries, like Ottolenghi putting cinnamon into his salad dressing, but otherwise don’t fix what ain’t broke.

Can you improve on melon-ham combo?

Melon is the perfect pairing with Parma ham, like smoked salmon is with cream cheese. At least that's the popular opinion. But a couple of years ago I had this starter in a great little Provençal bistrot and I fell in love. Smoked fish – in the original dish it was local trout, house-smoked – was layered with deliciously cold and immaculately ripe melon slices.

There was a sprinkling of herbs, there was tart and sweet dressing and the whole dish was delightful. I didn’t ask for a recipe, foolish me, but thanks to that omission I was able to create my own take on it here without being accused of plagiarising theirs.

Ripe, seasonal and good quality

I feel obliged to add a caveat here: if you put together a barely ripe supermarket melon with some bog-standard smoked salmon slices, you’ll be disappointed.

I can’t ever talk enough of the importance of the local, seasonal and artisanal and nowhere does it come to the fore more than in this concoction. How to get a ripe melon? Visit your farmers market and grope all the melons until you find a ripe fruit. Alternatively, buy the most reduced in price supermarket one – it is bound to be the closest to ripe.

Cure your own salmon

As for salmon, the solution is at hand too: cure your own. It is easy, it is cost effective and the taste quality is brilliant. You might never go back to the few miserly slices of orange fish flesh on a pointless cardboard tray that cost a fiver.

It will be cured rather than smoked but unless you buy yours from a smokehouse in Scotland, you won't tell the diffterence.

How to assemble the salad

To be honest, there’s nothing toit: thin slices of salmon and melon alternating, but you can also toss them together if you prefer more chaotic looking salads.

The dressing is also simple: olive oil with balsamic vinegar, both the best quality available, with lemon juice to help the mixture emulsify. There’s a neat trick I can share here: if you own one of those (otherwise useless) milk frothers, battery operated or manual, it comes in very handy to whisk dressing, in this instance and all the other dressing occasions.

Fresh mint leaves will add tonnes of flavour, as do chopped up, sprinkled pistachios.

More salmon recipes

Chunky salmon burgers with capers, mint and dill, are best served with chilli yoghurt dip. The bun is optional.

Lettuce leaf wrapped salmon with spinach filling is the healthy version of salmon en croute or coulibiac. A side of salmon topped with spinach, baked in a lettuce parcel is easy and impressive.

Steamed side of salmon in a foil parcel with dill, chilies and soy sauce. Steaming takes only 15 minutes and the salmon can be served hot or cold.

More melon recipes

Chicken and melon salad with feta and avocado. Roasted sliced chicken breast is lovely paired with fresh melon, salty feta, filo crumbs and a few seeds.

Watermelon and feta salad is the simplest summery perfection, the salty-sweet combo in the most refreshing form. Whole or half a watermelon is really easy to prepare and much better value than prepacked tubs.