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The Most Versatile Summer Salad

Not every vegetable needs to be raw. Yotam Ottolenghi chars his vegetables for salads that can be served over pasta, tucked into sandwiches or used as a dip.

Charred tomatoes with feta and harissa pine nuts, a dish inspired by North African salads. Credit...Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

LONDON — When you hear “summer salad,” I bet the first thing that comes to mind isn’t a bunch of vegetables cooked within an inch of their lives and left to hang out so their juices meld and their flavors turn hearty and complex. These kinds of techniques are usually left to robust meaty stews or wintry soups, and not applied to the cream of the summer’s freshest and juiciest crop.

In reality, some of the best and most wonderful dishes using summer’s glut are doing just that, and with huge success. They may not look like your typical salad; they can also be seen as dips or spreads. But salads are what they are, because they keep the integrity of the vegetables as they are mixed together, and they are mostly served cold, alongside other dishes.

Though you can find cooked salads all around the northern and eastern Mediterranean — French ratatouille and Italian peperonata are variations on the theme — I find that the best examples are served in North Africa, particularly in Morocco and Tunisia. This is where you will often find little bites of exquisitely cooked vegetables, served alongside fresh raw salads. Called kemia, they are the equivalent of mezze or tapas in other parts of the region.

Taktouka is one of my favorites: It involves grilling green pepper over fire or in the oven, and then cooking it slowly in a pan with chopped tomatoes, garlic, cumin and lots of olive oil. It gets better after a day or two, once the flavors have been left to develop and the ingredients to interact and amalgamate. Zaalouk is another popular variant, in which eggplants take the place of the peppers; they can be grilled first, or cooked throughout in the pan with the tomatoes.

I am not sure which came first, these cooked salads or the soft white North African breads they are often served with, but for me they are inseparable. Each is actually a good reason for the other’s existence: The bread is essential for soaking up every bit of the splendidly flavored salad juices, while the salad atop a slice lifts it to new bready heights.

Grilling all or some of the vegetables before cooking them in the pan is a way of intensifying the flavors and adding a bit of char, smoke and bittersweetness to the mix. In mechouia, a Tunisian salad made with peppers, onions and tomatoes, all the vegetables are first grilled well and then minced. The underlying flavor of the grill is both unmistakable and totally seductive, just as it is in mechouia’s more famous cousin from the eastern Mediterranean: the eggplant salad baba ghanouj.

There are, in fact, countless variations on all of these salads, differing regionally and even from one family to the next. Ingredients such as zucchini, carrots, pumpkins or potatoes are often thrown into the mix, as well as hot chiles, lemon juice and spices like caraway and cinnamon.

This inherent flexibility you have with the ingredients, coupled with the different ways you cook them, is a reason to celebrate these salads, and the wonderful tapestry they create.

Another reason to rejoice, which is perhaps more relevant to a modern cook with a busy life, is the versatility of these salads — the many different uses they have. This is really what I had in mind when I created my own take on these North African dishes: charred tomatoes with feta, cooked in the oven from start to finish.

Starting off, it can be served hot as a chunky sauce over couscous, pasta or rice. Once it has cooled down a little, you can serve it as condiment to meat or alongside other vegetable dishes to create your own kemia. Finally, you can put it in a jar and keep in the fridge for a couple of days (I’d remove the feta for this), ready as an instant sandwich filler or to proudly reappear on the table with a bunch of other summery salads.

Recipe: Grilled Tomatoes and Onions With Feta-Harissa Pine Nuts

Yotam Ottolenghi is a writer and the chef-owner of the Ottolenghi restaurants, Nopi and Rovi, in London. He writes a monthly food column in The Times and a weekly column for The Guardian’s Feast Magazine. More about Yotam Ottolenghi

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Most Versatile Summer Salad. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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