Summer salad 🌞 with orange, fennel and plant feta
Zingy, sweet, savoury, crispy, crunchy, colourful … This salad has it all.
Recipe: Summer salad 🌞 with orange, fennel and plant feta
I discovered the amazing combo of orange and fennel via my friend Lys (check her Instagram!). I decided to post my take on this delicious combo here on Plant-Aardig since I didn’t have much in the way of light, fresh and summery recipes on the blog – until now!
This salad is super quick and easy to prepare: basically just assemble the ingredients on the plate and drizzle with olive oil and crema di balsamico.
For this recipe you should ideally get your veggies from somewhere where they sell them with the leaves and stalks still in tact. But as long as you retain the orange and fennel (the core of the dish), you can adapt this recipe to suit whatever ingredients you like. The beetroot leaves, for example, can be swapped for another leafy green, like rucola.
I add some almost-charred fennel leaves for added flavour, texture and colour. But you can skip instruction #2 if you think I’m losing the plot. Or if you can’t find fennel with the leaves still on.
Makes enough for two people.
Ingredients
1 large seedless orange, peeled and sliced into discs.
1 small-medium fennel bulb (with stalks and leaves, preferably)
2 beetroots, leaves only
100g plant feta* (or as much as you desire), cubed
A handful of whole almonds, skinless, unroasted
Olive oil
Crema di balsamico**
Instructions
Toast your almonds in a pan on medium heat with a splash of olive oil and a pinch of salt. Remove when lightly browned and set aside.
If you were able to procure the entire fennel including the leaves: add a splash more oil to the pan and shallow-fry some of the sparser leaf tips (not the younger tips, which are more fine and feathery. We’ll use those as a raw garnish).
Season with a pinch of salt and pull them from the pan when crispy and almost burned. Be careful: they may splatter and sputter a bit when you add them to the oil.Chop the hard bottom off the fennel bulb and pull the layers apart. Try to keep the segments whole, so that when you slice them they have a nice shape. Slice them thinly into half-rings.
You can optionally add some thinly-sliced fennel stalk for visual variation.
Assemble all the ingredients on two plates as artfully is you can. Garnish with almonds, some feathery young fennel leaves as well as your charred fennel leaves prepared earlier.
Finish with a drizzle of olive oil and crema di balsamico. I don’t add any further salt since the almonds, fennel leaves and feta are salty. But you do you. Enjoy!
Tips 💡
*Plant feta: if you don’t want to make it yourself, the one from the brand Violife is surprisingly tasty :)
**Crema di balsamico. You can buy this in stores or make it yourself by reducing balsamic vinegar by half and adding sugar to taste.
Swap beetroot leaves for rucola or another leafy green of your choice. I like the beetroot leaves for their colour.
You could add some of the actual beetroot, too, but the fennel is already very crunchy, and you don’t want your jaws to be tired by the end of the salad. So add less fennel and more beetroot if you want to try this. Personally, I like to let the orange be the main sweet influence in this dish.
I added some sliced fresh red chili for fruity heat and colour … and because I’m addicted.
