shaved fennel and crushed olive salad – smitten kitchen

Last week I childishly pouted that nobody really loves fennel salads and so many of you commented that you wanted one, I am delighted I’ve been given the external validation I require to share a new one here. This fennel salad is from Café Altro Paradiso, which shares a chef — Ignacio Mattos — with two other New York restaurants, estela and Flora Bar. What I love about the cooking at these restaurants is that there’s a quiet minimalism to each dish that belies the actual complexity of flavors. It’s particularly evident in salads. At estela, my favorite is this endive salad, which seems like the most plain pile of lettuce until you find the heap of loudly flavored texture and crunch below, for scooping onto the leaves. This fennel salad looks equally unassuming when it comes out: a mountain of shaved bulb. But it sits on a piquant medley of crushed olives, thinly sliced stems, minced fronds, sharp cheese, citrus zest, juice, wine vinegar, olive oil, and seasoning that I’m not sure I ever want to stop eating.

Fennel is divisive. Olives are divisive. I know this salad isn’t for everyone — I mean, what is, truly, except puppies, kittens, and thriving postal service — and if you’re about to tell me that you’d like this except for the fennel and/or the olives, shh, you don’t need to because I already know. I’ll have something you like more next week. Everyone gets a turn. I’ve gone full Mom Voice, haven’t I?

But if you’re even ever-so-slightly on the fence, you should know that this one has converted many people. I tend to make it whenever suits us and keep it in two containers — the dressed, shaved fennel bulb in one and the olive mixture in the other — because the complexity is more noticeable when it hasn’t been mixed as long. Salads like this — that keep well in the fridge because they don’t enlist quick-wilting lettuces — are a key part of our summer cooking. These bean salads, broccoli salads, carrot salads and more are the kind of thing you can pull out at the end of the day and serve solo or with something else: focaccia, a simple aglio e olio spaghetti, a grilled steak or chicken thighs, if that’s what you crave. I hope this makes its way into your low-fuss summer rotation, too.

Fennel, here and elsewhere: There are two more fennel salads here, one with blood oranges and one with proscuitto and pomegranate, so they both feel very wintery. There’s also this green salad with a fennel seed vinaigrette. Oh, and also a fennel seed ice cream that I love, even if few others do. Finally, in Smitten Kitchen Every Day, there’s a Fennel, Pear, Celery, and Hazelnut Salad, which I jokingly call the Haters’ Salad because there are so many maligned ingredients in it.