Macho salads

Our man in the kitchen Jack Shamash defies you to find a finer salad than his - and gives you the recipe

How to make the greatest salad in the world and make Gordon Ramsay seem very ordinary.

I don't normally boast. But my salads are the best I've ever tasted.. I've been to pretty fancy restaurants and none of their salads are any better than mine.

The reason why my salads are so good is that I am very lazy - I am just too lazy to make a bad salad. Let me explain...

If you go to a top restaurant you will usually be charged around a fiver for a mixed or a green salad. The salad will probably contain about 20 pence worth of vegetation, so to justify the ridiculous mark-up, the chefs have to do a lot of messing around. They will add blanched carrots or use raspberry flavoured vinegar. They will add lardons or new boiled potatoes or tarragon or artichoke hearts. And it will all be laid out very delicately over a 12 inch white plate, and it will be drizzled with some strange coloured vinaigrette or dusted with some funny powdered herb - and it will be a terrible disappointment.

If you come to my house, I will start making the salad about two minutes before I intend to eat. I run out to my front garden and grab a handful of leaves from one of the growbags by the frontpath.

I buy a couple of growbags every year from Homebase - they cost about £1.30p each. I cut two strips off the top of each bag, so that I can grow two lines of plants. I then plant a bunch of seeds. This year I am using a bag of seeds that I bought from Woolworths which contains six varieties of salad leaf - including corn salad, land cress, lettuce leaves and rocket. I usually plant the seeds in May.

As you long as you keep the bags watered - and plant more seeds every few weeks to replace those that you've eaten, you'll never have to buy salad leaves between June and the end of September.

I will also take the leaves off some of the nasturtiums on my windowsill. Nasturtiums are incredibly easy to grow and the leaves have a wonderful peppery taste.

Once I've got a handful of leaves, I wash them, cut them up, and put them in a bowl. I'll chop up a couple of slices of onion and put them on top. Then I'll add a dressing.

The dressing is the simplest thing on earth. You get a couple of tablespoons of red wine vinegar, about twice as much oil (extra virgin olive oil is best), some salt, some fresh ground pepper and a really good dollop of Dijon mustard. Crush a clove of garlic and throw it in for good measure. The result is a truly great vinaigrette.

Whatever you do, don't use Balsamic Vinegar. Balsamic vinegar was very trendy about five years ago, but it's nasty sickly stuff and the people of Modena, where Balsamic vinegar originates - should be boiled in it. Make far more dressing than you need, and you can store it in a screw top container in the fridge.

If you do this, you too will have wonderful salads just like mine. You will win the admiration of your family, your friends, your dinner guests and fellow gardeners. It will save you a fortune and the environment will say ‘thank you'. And it will cost you next to nothing - unlike the stuff you get at the top restaurants.

 

JACK SHAMASH puts meals on the family table every night of the week at his home in north London. He also writes for The Times, The Guardian and Horticulture Week (so he knows a lot about fruit and veg)