Olives in Summer Salads: Five Fresh Ideas
A handful of olives turns a plain summer salad into something with depth and bite. Here are five fast, no-recipe ways to put them to work when the weather’s warm.
In summer, when you want to cook as little as possible, olives are the cook’s shortcut to flavour — salt, savour and richness, straight from the jar. Five ideas to riff on.
1. The Greek, properly
Tomatoes, cucumber, onion, green pepper, a slab of feta, Kalamata olives, oregano and good oil. No lettuce, ever. (The full meze is here.)
2. Tomato and olive
Ripe tomatoes, torn, with black olives, basil, a little red onion and a flood of olive oil. Almost nothing, entirely summer.
3. White bean and olive
Cannellini beans, green olives, celery, lemon, parsley — a protein-rich salad that keeps for days.
4. Panzanella
Stale bread soaked in tomato juices and oil, with olives, cucumber and basil — the Tuscan way to use up bread and tomatoes at once.
5. Fennel and orange
Shaved fennel, citrus and black olives — bright and aniseed (recipe here).
One principle ties all five together: in a raw salad, everything you taste is exactly what you put in. There’s no cooking to fix a tired ingredient, so use a ripe tomato, a good olive and a fresh, peppery oil — and dress it at the last minute so nothing wilts. The olives mean you’ll rarely need to add salt; let them do that job, and let a good oil do the rest.