“It ain’t gonna slide down easy if it ain’t cheesy!” That’s one of the signature lines of Tanara Mallory, the TikTok star who pokes fun at viral cooking videos by exclaiming, “Everybody’s so creative!”
It’s also not too far from my mind-set when I first started cooking vegetarian dishes. A dozen years ago, I leaned so heavily on eggs and cheese as a crutch, you’d be forgiven for not necessarily noticing the vegetables on the plate. I’ve come a long way. These days, I eat very little dairy cheese, preferring to showcase plants in my cooking, with little to no need for adornment by animal products.
But I still have a soft spot (pun intended) for one cheese in particular: burrata, the mash-up of mozzarella and cream that, when it is fresh, adds a dose of indulgence to anything you pair it with. I still remember the first time I had a burrata appetizer at D.C.’s Centrolina restaurant; I was with a colleague from the Food team, and we marveled at how transcendent the simple marriage of burrata and peak produce could be. That time of year, it was cherries, and the duo was finished with little more than sublime olive oil and flaky sea salt. I considered asking chef/owner Amy Brandwein for a recipe, but it seemed almost too simple to write down.
A salad from Sheela Prakash’s delightful new book, “Salad Seasons,” takes a similar approach by combining burrata with a springtime star — sugar snap peas. Prakash’s point is made clear by the title’s plurality: Salad is not just for the warm-weather months. As she writes, “a salad made with in-season goodies can be on the center of your table even in the depths of winter.”
In six months, I have no doubt, I’ll be tempted by her blackened broccoli rabe Caesar. But here and now, I’m grabbing what’s pouring out of markets and gardens, and that includes sugar snaps. My husband is a fan, too; he still talks about the day years ago when on my sister and brother-in-law’s Maine homestead, he picked a sugar snap off the vine and couldn’t believe how good it tasted without a single application of seasoning or heat. It helped sell him on my own attempts to grow food in our D.C. backyard.
Indeed, you can’t go wrong by eating peak-season sugar snaps raw. But for this salad, Prakash has you add even more layers of flavor, simply by searing them in a hot skillet and tossing them with soft red onions and a lemony vinaigrette. When you scatter them around a ball or two of burrata on a platter, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with sumac and salt, then take a bite, you’ll wonder why you never thought of this before. Creamy meets crunchy, sweet meets tart, perfection meets … perfection.
And yet. For those of you who don’t eat dairy at all, let me reassure you. While burrata is unique, I’ve made this same salad with vegan mozzarella (my favorite is Miyoko’s brand) and even silken tofu, and it’s outstanding. Even the sugar snaps can be swapped out for snow peas, asparagus or green beans. Just make sure whatever you use is at its freshest, and it’ll go down easy.