Melon & Tomato Salad with Cilantro Nước Chấm
This salad is a love letter to late summer fruits, all combined with a classic Vietnamese fish sauce dressing and crunchy sesame. This sweet, tangy and herbaceous sauce it a Vietnamese classic, and with these juicy, fresh fruits, it's one of my favorite odes to the end of summer.
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp fish sauce
- 2 tbsp rice vinegar
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 2-3 small birds eye chilies seeds removed and finely chopped
- 2 cloves garlic minced
- 1" knob fresh ginger minced
- 1 lime for juicing
- 1 cup cilantro finely chopped
- 1/2 of a medium canary melon or honeydew melon
- 6 small to medium tomatoes of assorted colors
- 1 small persian cucumber
- 1 tbsp toasted sesame seeds for topping
- 1 tbsp chili oil for topping
Instructions
- In a medium sized bowl, whisk together the fish sauce, rice vinegar, sugar and juice from the lime. Whisk until the sugar has dissolved.
- Add in the cilantro, chilies, garlic and ginger and whisk again. Add more rice vinegar if the sauce needs to thin out a bit more. Set this aside, it gets better as the ingredients meld together.
- Deseed and thinly slice the melon - how you slice is up to you but I like thin long strips. Quarter the tomatoes and very thinly slice the cucumber. You want the cucumbers so thin you can almost see through them. Toss everything in the bowl with the dressing.
- Use clean hands to toss the salad and combine.
- To plate, scatter everything on a large plate in a thin layer, let the colors come through! Sprinkle with sesame seeds and dot with chili oil. Enjoy!