You'll want to grab the best ingredients you can find for this classic summertime staple.
, a watermelon, mint, and feta salad is much more forgiving when it comes to riffing and improvising.Every long-lasting, well-liked dish goes through a few distinct phases: its creation, its initial burst of popularity, the backlash, and finally its acceptance into the cultural lexicon. I have no idea when and where the watermelon, feta, and mint salad was created , but it was well into its initial phase of popularity when I first encountered it at a restaurant I worked at back in 2005.
His watermelons were remarkable. Dense, richly colored, deeply aromatic, and sweet. A far cry from the average watery, bland supermarket watermelon. I've yet to find my watermelon guy in my current home in California, but there are still ways to locate decent specimens. The best method by far is to hit your local farmers market in the summer, and look for vendors with opened watermelons who will let you take a taste before you purchase.
*Technically, Bulgarian feta is called sirene; it can have a slightly creamier texture than Greek feta, but there's a lot of variation among products, so it's difficult to generalize.Once you have a good watermelon and good feta, you're almost done here! All you've got to do is toss that watermelon with some lemon juice, extra-virgin olive oil, and chopped mint, then sprinkle it with feta, and you'll have yourself a great little salad.
For my salad, I'm not going to demand that anyone chop their zest that fine. In fact, I prefer the moister texture and small bursts of flavor that you get from zest that's finely chopped, but not totally pulverized.