Ina Garten’s Heirloom Tomato and Blue Cheese Salad Is a Perfect Summer Dish
Ina Garten gives a boring tomato salad a new spin with her heirloom tomato and blue cheese salad recipe. The Barefoot Contessa star offered her recipe up as a perfect no-cook idea for summer.
Ina Garten makes a delicious no-cook tomato salad
On July 26, Garten took to Instagram to share an easy tomato salad featured in her upcoming cookbook. The Barefoot Contessa star featured no-cook recipes for summer throughout the week on her social media account.
“TOO HOT TO COOK!!” she wrote in the caption. “Not just any tomato salad but my Heirloom Tomato & Blue Cheese Salad — it’s a sneak peak from my next book Go-To Dinners! I pick up a rotisserie chicken on the way home and dinner’s ready!”
How to make Ina Garten’s heirloom tomato and blue cheese salad
Garten’s tomato salad is a cinch to make and has loads of delicious fresh flavors.
She slices heirloom tomatoes and arranges them on a platter, then scatters halved heirloom cherry tomatoes on the plate. She sprinkles salt over the tomatoes and drizzles on vinegar, then sets them aside for 5 minutes.
Garten slices Roquefort blue cheese and sprinkles rough broken pieces of the cheese on top of the tomatoes. To finish the easy salad, she scatters on torn basil leaves and drizzles olive oil over everything, then adds a sprinkle of salt and pepper.
The Barefoot Contessa star recommends serving the salad at room temperature and, as she shares in her Instagram post, says this is a perfect side dish for a store-bought rotisserie chicken. No cooking required!
The ‘Barefoot Contessa’ star makes a typically boring salad more delicious
While demonstrating how to make her tomato, mozzarella, and basil recipe on an episode of Barefoot Contessa, Garten shared how to make a typically “boring” salad more interesting.
“Tomato and basil salad can be really good but it can be really boring,” she said. “So I’m going to do it in a totally different way.”
Garten used a variety of ripe heirloom tomatoes to provide flavor and color, as well as red tomatoes and yellow tomatoes for the salad. “You really want to make this when the tomatoes are ripe,” the Food Network host explained. “This is not a winter salad, particularly. The yellow tomatoes are actually a little less acidic, so I like to combine them with the red tomatoes.”
She sliced tomatoes and “really good” mozzarella, put them on a platter, and scattered more wedges of tomato on top, then tucked basil between the cheese and tomatoes. She drizzled olive oil over the top and seasoned the dish with salt and pepper.
“Now that’s not a boring tomato mozzarella and basil salad — it’s gorgeous,” Garten said.
You can find the full recipe on the Food Network website.
