Add A Sweet Component To Tomato Salad For A More Balanced Bite

For a meal that fully embodies the gifts of summer, there is little better than a tomato salad. Fresh from the garden, fragrant tomatoes picked at the height of the season don't need much else to become a lovely salad, as this two-ingredient tomato and onion salad recipe proves. But if you really want to take your tomato salad to the next level, cookbook author Justine Doiron suggests that a little sweetness is exactly what you're looking for.

"Tomatoes are naturally acidic, so they love a little sweetness," she tells us, adding that "stone fruit and tomatoes are a pretty classic combo." If you don't know what a stone fruit is, it is a fairly broad category that includes everything from peaches and plums to nectarines, cherries, and technically even almonds and coconuts — but those last two aren't what we're talking about here. "I think nectarines and peaches have the right amount of tartness to go well with any variety of tomato," Dorion suggests. "And beyond salads, peaches are surprisingly versatile."

But Doiron is also not about to rain on the parade of your favorite stone fruit. She adds that, while apricots or plums wouldn't be her first choice to pair with tomatoes, it's ultimately "down to personal taste." If you are looking for a means to work in cherries or plums, blending fruit into a vinaigrette is a simple way to make sure that you get plenty of that sweet, tart fruit flavor in every bite.

But making the perfect tomato salad is about more than just sweetness. In fact, adding that sweetness can push the flavor of the tomato salad a little too far to one side of the flavor spectrum. Fortunately, Doiron has a solution for that as well. "Just remember that you are adding a fruit, so your salad is automatically going to skew sweet-and-savory," she tells us. "So you will need to balance it accordingly. This means plenty of salt, a good olive oil (if you are using it), and a ton of herbs."

To bring up the salt factor, simply add a nice sprinkle of the flaky good stuff, or take a page out of Doiron's (cook) book and use a splash of tamari. Tamari not only adds salt but also amplifies the umami in the tomatoes, rounding out the added sweetness beautifully. As for herbs, Doiron suggests two summer favorites, basil and mint. "While you can get all fancy and chiffonade-cut these leaves, I recommend giving them a rough tear with your hands," she says. For this cookbook author, the imperfection of torn herbs is exactly the point. Chiffonade basil is nice and uniform, but hand-tearing leads to the occasional larger piece of basil, which is her favorite part.

Perhaps we'll see some iteration of this sweet-and-salty tomato salad in the HelloFresh meal kit that Doiron is developing in conjunction with Nature Made. If not, you'll just have to take her advice and get creative on your own. Before you do, this list of the best fruits to pair with tomatoes should provide some helpful inspiration.