Summer Sides: Corn, Tomato, and Avocado Salad
Summer may be flagging, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet. Fall in Buffalo is a sneeze away from the dreaded, snowy winters that threaten to turn our roadscapes into gray, slushy nightmares. I will cling to summer as long as I can.
Having said that, I can still get locally-grown, late-summer produce pretty readily, so I thought we should celebrate that while we can. More of our dishes should really focus on what we can get fresh, local, and seasonally; with that in mind, I’m focusing today’s spot on a side that would be welcome at any barbecue, whether it be in July or September.
(Buffalo folks are crazy. They’ll grill in December. They have absolutely zero cares to give about weather.)
As always, I'm going to talk for way too long about my process. Feel free to skip to the recipe by clicking this link here if you're just looking for the best bits. Otherwise, come on my site!
Veggie-tables
A delicious veggie-tableau awaits.
The primary components of this salad are very simple: corn, tomato, and avocado, combined in roughly equal proportions, The question is really one of preparation. Ready?
Consistent sizing in your cuts is key. At least, that’s what my chef keeps telling me.
Arguably, the easiest components here are the avocado and the tomato. They are also the easiest components to screw up royally.
Avocados are a fruit — a berry, to be precise — native to south-central Mexico. The tree produces many of these berries (referred to as “avocados” or “avocado pears”) each year. The fruit consists of a single, large seed, surrounded by a soft, green layer of naturally occurring plant fats. The seed uses this fatty layer as sustenance to begin its germination and sustain the plant through its early weeks. We know avocados as the soft, buttery green stuff that makes guacamole delicious. The trouble is, if you have a sub-par avocado, everything else falls apart.
This is one of those shots that only exists to make it look like I know what I’m doing.
This is how my sushi chefs taught me to cut avocados — run the knife around the outside twice, creating quarters, then twist it apart and just pop the pit out.
When shopping for avocados, if you’re planning to use them the same day, you should really be looking for something that’s dark green (verging on brown or black) and soft to the touch. You don’t have to squeeze the hell out of these things to tell how ripe they are, a gentle finger touch should tell you all you need to know. The outside of the avocado should yield a little to your touch, without permanently denting. If the avocado is bright green and firm, toss it in a paper bag with a banana for a couple of days — bananas produce a high amount of ethylene gas, which encourages fruits to ripen. If the fruit dents or smushes, chuck it. If you find a lot of brown streaks through the fruit, it’s rotten. If you find that the skin is dark but the interior of the fruit is oddly fibrous and tough, it’s likely that your avocado is trying to germinate. These avocados are fine for guacamole (mashing breaks up those fibers), but I wouldn’t use them in this salad.
Good rule of thumb for tomatoes: if they look tasty, they are.
Tomatoes are also a berry (this is a pretty well-known fact by now), ranging from light green to bright red, depending on ripeness. These fruits also originate from western South America through southern Central America, though they’re widely cultivated these days. Of the many varieties, I went with some locally-grown beefsteaks for this salad — ideally, you want something firm and not too wet, to provide that wonderful texture to the salad.
Tomatoes in the off-season are an abomination. To prevent tomatoes from being crushed in transportation, growers will pick tomatoes while they’re still green and ship them in containers packed full of ethylene gas (remember, like from bananas?). This will ensure that they arrive to your grocery store intact and bright red, but also essentially flavorless. Your best bet here is to buy tomatoes in the mid- to late-summer months, preferably locally grown; the less distance the tomatoes have to travel, the riper they can be when they’re packed.
Finally, there’s the corn.
Normally, this kind of content would be hidden behind a paywall.
As many of you may know, corn is actually a grain. Indeed, once upon a time, the English word “corn” referred to any kind of grain kernel, not specifically to the new-world “maize” which would later become synonymous with the term. The evidence of this etymology can still be seen in German: “einkorn” (lit. “one grain”) translates to “whole grain,” and “korn” is still shorthand for a neutral grain-distilled spirit in most of Germany.
Still, American sweet corn can provide your body with many of the benefits of whole grains and is therefore a worthy addition to your summer bounty; in addition to complex carbohydrates, sweet corn is positively packed with dietary fiber (which is why you might recognize it on its way out). Corn is a sweet, healthy treat, and by no means to be discounted just because it isn’t technically a vegetable.
For this recipe, because it’s summer, I decided to cook the corn straight on the grill. Well, sort of on the grill. Okay, I don’t actually have a grill anymore.
I’m sure that you could believe that this does not work as well as a proper grill.
For a variety of reasons, my gas grill has rusted clear through and is no longer viable (unless you like hot fat dripping on your propane tank). With this in mind, I decided to just char up the corn on a cast-iron grill pan (which is like a cast-iron pan, but worse, because it has fewer points of contact). I seasoned the corn lightly with an herbaceous oil and a touch of salt and pepper, then chucked it straight on that metal grate.
It’ll get you there, I guess.
The trick with this corn (and most grilled or fire-roasted veg) is to get some color on it, then chuck it into a large bowl and cover it, be it with plastic wrap, aluminum foil, or a tight-fitting lid. What you want is for the residual heat and moisture from the veggies to create steam, which you’ve now trapped in your nifty bowl contraption, and will cook that vegetable through the rest of the way. It’s a nifty — and very useful — trick.
I think the next part is pretty self-explanatory: you cut these things up and chuck ‘em together. The question is, what marries them all?
The Dressing; or, The Dressening
The dressing for this salad could hardly be simpler: it’s a lime vinaigrette. I mean, what did you expect?
Here’s the trick, though. This salad screams for brightness, for freshness. You have grill flavor, sweetness, acid, fattiness, everything you could imagine; you need some herbage — no, not the kind you can get in Colorado.
Name! That! Herb!
In keeping with the southwestern-American vibes of this dish, I went with a hearty serving of chopped cilantro in the salad. Bear in mind, this is but one option; parsley, thyme, mint, or basil would all be welcome additions at this party. You could even get really funky and add a little chili powder or freshly-ground cumin to the dressing to really make this salad sing of the Southwest!
Doesn’t it kind of make you want ribs, just looking at it?
Seasonality
I spoke above about how this is a salad based in seasonality; the ingredients here are (mostly) at their best in mid- to late-summer, and this is the time when you should really eat it. But, what if you’re like many consumers, and you can’t be bothered with things like seasonality? What if you’re craving this in February?
Don’t worry, fam. I got you.
Corn is an easy one; you can go with either canned or frozen corn. In either case, that corn has been picked and processed right at the peak of ripeness, so you won’t have to worry at all about making sure it’s ready to go. You won’t be able to grill it, of course, but just skip that step and carry on. You’ll still like it.
Avocados are grown largely in the tropics these days, ranging from northern Peru to southern Mexico, so you’ll see these puppies year-round. As always, if you don’t find them to be the ripeness you like, buy them a couple of days ahead of time and let them ripen on the counter at home. Remember that grocery stores tend to bring them in kind of underripe so they have time to sell them, and try to buy your avocados a few days ahead. If they’re ready before you are, just keep them in the fridge.
As for tomatoes, we’ve talked about the abomination that is off-season tomatoes. If you must work with tomatoes off-season, I recommend small tomatoes, either grape or cherry. The smaller the tomatoes, the less growers need to worry about them crushing under their own weight during transport, so the riper you can get them. Not to mention, there are more than a few greenhouses growing nice cherry and grape tomatoes year-round right here in the States. Of course, you won’t need to process them as much as if they were big, honking beefsteaks, but maybe just cut those little boys right in half before you toss ‘em in.
Enough talk. On with the show!
The Recipe
4 ears of corn, cleaned and shucked
1 Tbsp oil (neutral or flavored, your choice)
2 medium avocados, large diced
2-3 fresh tomatoes, large diced.
2 Tbsp lime juice (preferably from 2 fresh limes)
3 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 c. chopped fresh cilantro
Salt and pepper, to taste
Preheat a grill or grill pan on medium-high heat until smoking.
Lightly oil your ears of corn, and season lightly with salt and pepper. Place on grill (pan).
Grill corn, turning every 1-2 minutes, until corn shows charring on all sides. Remove corn from the grill (pan) and move to a large, heat-proof bowl. Cover with plastic wrap, aluminum foil, or a tight-fitting lid, and let rest for about five minutes.
Cut corn off of the cob, then add to a large bowl with avocados and tomatoes.
In a small bowl, whisk together lime juice and olive oil until a thick emulsion forms. Add to the bowl with the corn, tomato, and avocado. Add cilantro to bowl, then mix.
Season as desired with salt and pepper, then serve immediately, or cover and refrigerate up to one day until ready to serve.
All ready for the BBQ! What? It’s… it’s fall? Shit.
That’s all, folks! We’re getting into some proper fall content soon, so let us know what you’re looking for in the seasons to come. Thanks for reading, and until next time, stay hungry!
