Ina Garten Loves This Side Dish So Much She Begged To Know The Recipe For It

Normally one to dole out her own cooking tips on Instagram, Ina Garten recently divulged that she had to beg and plead for her friend to share a recipe with her. In a post shared to her Instagram account, Garten raved about the farro salad from Charlie Bird in New York City's trendy SoHo neighborhood, calling it her "favorite side dish ever." Coming from a famous chef that's written a boatload of cookbooks, that is incredibly high praise for a side dish.  

A unique aspect of the salad is that the farro is cooked in apple cider and bay leaves, infusing flavor into the farro right from the beginning and imparting a lightly sweet note to the wheat grain. Also unique is that most of the ingredients are purposefully kept large, rather than chopped small, so that each individual ingredient can shine and contribute to the overall taste and texture of the dish. Garten loves a good quality olive oil, which is an important factor in this salad. The farro gets another boost of flavor from being tossed with some of the lemon vinaigrette as soon as it's cooked (but make sure you save some to add at the end), as the warm grains are better able to soak up the dressing when they're still hot.

After the warm farro is bathed in the lemon vinaigrette, whole pistachios are added, followed by roughly chopped parsley (with some stems included), which Garten notes is a key flavor in the salad rather than just a finely chopped garnish on top. Similarly, Garten picks mint leaves from their woody stems and gives the second herb a rough chop. Cherry tomatoes are halved and then added, while red radishes are sliced very thinly on a mandoline. If you don't have a mandoline at home, you could slice the radishes into rounds and then into small matchsticks, which gives a similar thinness to the radishes so that they're easier to eat. 

The salad then gets a few generous handfuls of bitter arugula, followed by a transfer to a large serving bowl before everything is tossed together. If needed, you can add some of the extra reserved lemon vinaigrette or more salt and pepper as you taste the salad for seasoning. Garten garnishes the salad with a heaping half cup of freshly shaved parmesan cheese, for which she uses a y-peeler to shave long, substantial slices, ensuring that it stays chunky enough to stand on its own and doesn't dissolve into the rest of the salad. Charlie Bird's hearty farro salad would be satisfying on its own as a meal, especially for lunch, but it also serves as a perfect accompaniment to a lemony roasted chicken, and Garten recommends it as a side for lamb and fish dishes as well.