You can spot great cooks not by what they do with the best ingredients but by what they do with the scraps. Italian, French, and Spanish cooks all make amazing dishes with old bread; Mexicans do astonishing things with leftover tortillas. In Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East there is a whole class of dishes dedicated to using up old flatbread, called fattat. Fattoush is the king of fattat. It hits all the notes I want in a salad: lots of texture, great flavor, and bright clean freshness from the herbs and the pomegranate vinaigrette. That’s probably why it continues to be one of our most popular dishes at Zaytinya. You could use stale pitas, as savvy cooks in Lebanon do, but supermarket pita chips do the trick.
SERVES 4
1 seedless (English) cucumber, quartered lengthwise and cut into ¾-inch dice
1 green bell pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into ¾-inch pieces
6 to 8 radishes, thinly sliced
12 cherry tomatoes, halved
½ cup thinly sliced red onion
⅓ cup coarsely chopped flat-leaf parsley
¼ cup coarsely chopped mint
1 teaspoon sumac
½ cup Pomegranate Molasses Vinaigrette
Kosher salt
4 cups pita chips (or 4 old pitas, toasted and broken into ½-inch pieces)
Combine the cucumber, pepper, radishes, tomatoes, onion, parsley, mint, and sumac in a large bowl. Toss with enough vinaigrette to generously coat the vegetables. Season with salt and toss again.
Top the salad with the pita chips and serve.