Greens - Supper

The Tomato Salad That Needs Nothing Else

Delphine Roy — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One large platter, as a side
10 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

900 g ripe tomatoes, mixed sizes and colours
flaky salt, more than feels correct
3 tbsp good olive oil
1 tsp red wine vinegar, optional, and only if the tomatoes are dull
torn basil
coarsely cracked black pepper

There is a version of this salad on every restaurant menu between June and September, and most of them have too much in them. Shallots, capers, a mustard vinaigrette, a hard cheese — each one is defensible on its own and together they bury the thing you paid for.

A tomato at the height of its season is already sweet, already acidic, and already savoury. What it wants is salt, fat, and time. Everything else is a hedge against tomatoes that are not very good, and the honest answer in that case is to cook them instead.

Mixed sizes and colours, and none of them refrigerated. This is the entire shopping list.Richard Heinen

Why the waiting matters

Salt does not season the surface of a tomato so much as it opens it. Twenty minutes after salting, there is a slick of pink juice on the platter that was not there before, and it is more concentrated than anything you could have made in a bowl. Pour the oil in and it emulsifies on contact.

This is also why the salad is assembled on the plate it is served from. Tossed in a bowl, the juice stays in the bowl.

What to put beside it

Bread, torn not sliced. A hard-boiled egg if it is lunch. Cold white wine, or a beer, and nothing that needs a knife.

If you want to make it a meal, the focaccia is the right bread, and you can tear it straight into the juice.

Shaved Fennel with Citrus and Mint

Delphine Roy — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A side for four
15 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

2 fennel bulbs, fronds kept
2 oranges
1 lemon, juice only
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp honey
20 g mint leaves, torn, not chopped
40 g toasted pistachios, roughly chopped
flaky salt and black pepper

Raw fennel divides people, and almost every conversion I have managed came down to thickness. Cut into wedges it is aggressive, fibrous, and unmistakably of aniseed. Shaved to a millimetre it is delicate, faintly sweet, and mostly a texture.

The rest of the dish is a lesson in not wasting anything: the juice that runs out while you segment the oranges is the dressing, and it is better than anything you would have built from a bottle.

The mandoline argument

A mandoline gets you consistent, translucent slices in ninety seconds and is worth owning for this alone. A sharp knife will do it, but “as thin as you can” with a knife usually means two or three millimetres, and that is a different salad.

If you are using a knife, halve the bulb through the root first so you have a flat face to stabilise it, and slice across the grain.

Iced water

Fennel is mostly water in rigid cells. Sliced thin, those cells lose turgor within minutes and the slices go limp. Ten minutes in iced water reverses it — the cells take water back up by osmosis and the slices curl and stiffen.

Then they have to be dried, thoroughly, in a towel or a spinner. Wet fennel dilutes the dressing and it will pool in the bottom of the bowl.

Honey against the fennel

A teaspoon is not there to sweeten the salad. It is there because fennel’s anise note reads as slightly bitter, and a small amount of sugar rounds that off without making the dressing taste sweet. Leave it out and the whole thing is sharper and less friendly.

Where it goes

Beside anything rich. It is the correct thing next to the roast chicken, and it cuts through the short ribs better than any green salad would.

Roast Carrots with Yogurt and Dukkah

Delphine Roy — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A generous side for four
50 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

For the carrots

800 g carrots, halved lengthways if thick
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp honey
flaky salt

For the yogurt

300 g thick Greek yogurt, cold, from the fridge
1 garlic clove, grated to a paste with a pinch of salt
1 tbsp lemon juice

For the dukkah

3 tbsp hazelnuts, toasted and chopped
1 tbsp sesame seeds
1 tsp coriander seeds, crushed
½ tsp cumin seeds, crushed
½ tsp flaky salt
dill or mint, to finish

This is a plate built on one idea, which is that hot food on cold food is more interesting than either on its own. The carrots come out of a 220C oven and go straight onto yogurt that has been in the fridge, and for the first two minutes on the table there is a genuine temperature gradient in every mouthful.

It is a trick borrowed from a hundred Levantine and Turkish dishes, and it works with almost any roasted vegetable. Carrots are the version I make most because they are always in the house and because they concentrate so obligingly.

Sweetness by subtraction

A carrot is around nine per cent sugar and a great deal of water. Roasted hard, the water leaves and the sugar stays, so what tasted mild raw tastes almost candied after half an hour. Push it further than feels safe: proper black at the tips is where the flavour is, and pale roast carrots are the most common way this goes wrong.

Halving thick carrots lengthways is not about cooking time. It is about creating a flat face that can sit against hot metal.

Honey at the end

Sugar added at the start of a 220C roast is burnt sugar by minute fifteen, and burnt sugar is bitter rather than sweet. A teaspoon tossed through in the last ten minutes glazes rather than scorches.

The garlic has to be a paste

Grated on a microplane and worked with salt until it is genuinely a paste, not chopped. Raw garlic in visible pieces in cold yogurt is harsh and keeps getting harsher; dispersed as a paste it is savoury and even.

Dukkah, and why it should stay coarse

The point of dukkah is that it crunches. Blitzing it in a processor releases oil from the hazelnuts and you end up with something closer to a wet crumb. Chop by hand, keep it uneven, and add it at the last second so it stays dry on top of the yogurt.

Charred Cabbage with Brown Butter

Delphine Roy — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A side for four, or dinner for two with bread
32 min total — Serves 4 — Easy

Ingredients

800 g hispi or savoy cabbage
2 tbsp neutral oil
80 g butter
2 tbsp capers, drained and patted dry
1 tbsp lemon juice
30 g hazelnuts, toasted and chopped
flaky salt and black pepper

Cabbage costs almost nothing and is treated accordingly, which is a shame, because a wedge of it seared black on both faces and dressed in brown butter is as good as any vegetable dish I make.

Two techniques, both simple, both easy to rush.

The core stays in

Cut the cabbage in quarters straight down through the stem so each wedge keeps a piece of the core. Two things happen. The wedge holds together in the pan and can be turned in one piece, and the core — which most recipes tell you to cut out — softens and sweetens into the best bit. Removing it gives you a pan of loose leaves that steam rather than sear.

Black is not burnt

Five minutes on one face without moving it. What you are after is a mottled, genuinely blackened surface, not an even golden one; those dark patches are where the flavour that makes this dish worth making comes from. Cabbage has enough sugar to take it.

The splash of water and the lid at the end are what get heat into the middle without the outside going further.

Brown butter, with a stopwatch

Butter is about sixteen per cent water and one per cent milk solids. Over heat the water boils off — the loud foaming stage — and then the milk solids toast. Toasted, they smell of hazelnut and taste of almost caramel. Twenty seconds later they smell of burnt and taste of it.

The lemon juice is the brake. It drops the temperature immediately and stops the reaction, and it also cuts the fat, which at eighty grams for four people it needs.

Capers

Dry capers in hot butter fry, blister, and go crisp and intensely savoury. Wet ones cool the butter and stay soft and vinegary. It is worth the thirty seconds with a piece of kitchen paper.