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Fattoush

You can spot great cooks not by what they do with the best ingredients but by what they do with the scraps. Italian, French, and Spanish cooks all make amazing dishes with old bread; Mexicans do astonishing things with leftover tortillas. In Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East there is a whole class of dishes dedicated to using up old flatbread, called fattat. Fattoush is the king of fattat. It hits all the notes I want in a salad: lots of texture, great flavor, and bright clean freshness from the herbs and the pomegranate vinaigrette. That’s probably why it continues to be one of our most popular dishes at Zaytinya. You could use stale pitas, as savvy cooks in Lebanon do, but supermarket pita chips do the trick.
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Ingredients
  

  • 1 seedless English cucumber, quartered lengthwise and cut into ¾-inch dice
  • 1 green bell pepper cored, seeded, and cut into ¾-inch pieces
  • 6 to 8 radishes thinly sliced 12 cherry tomatoes, halved
  • ½ cup thinly sliced red onion
  • ¹∕³ cup coarsely chopped fl parsley
  • ¼ cup coarsely chopped mint 1 teaspoon sumac
  • ½ cup Pomegranate Molasses Vinaigrette page 342
  • Kosher salt
  • 4 cups pita chips or 4 old pitas, toasted and broken into ½-inch pieces

Instructions
 

  • Combine the cucumber, pepper, radishes, tomatoes, onion, parsley, mint, and sumac in a large bowl.
  • Toss with enough vinaigrette to generously coat the vegetables. Season with salt and toss again.
  • Top the salad with the pita chips and serve.

Notes

CREDIT LINE: Excerpt from VEGETABLES UNLEASHED by José Andrés and Matt Goulding. Copyright 2019 by José Andrés. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.