Beans build the salad; bread makes it shine

On my annual list of summer salads, there's always fattoush. Like panzanella, its Italian cousin, fattoush makes use of leftover bread and combines it with fresh produce. This Middle Eastern dish often employs pomegranate molasses and tart sumac in its dressing, but variations abound.

I may like it even better than panzanella, and not just because it represents the cuisine of my people (or close to it, anyway). It's because of the bread: not cubes of sourdough or the like, but pieces of pita, which I love here for their firm texture.

As with any bread salad, fattoush changes as it sits. If you eat it immediately after it's tossed, that pita — which I like to char in a grill pan before tearing into pieces — will still be crisp, and to my mind, this is not when the salad is at its best. After 10 minutes, once the dressing starts to soak into the pita? That's when I love it — the pita has contrasting textures, a little crunchy still in spots but starting to soften here and there — and all the other flavors have started to marry. That stage lasts for a good hour or so. Soon thereafter, the pita pieces start getting soft through and through: not a bad thing, just different.

Traditional Lebanese versions of the dish are typically based on such simple vegetables as tomatoes, lettuce, onion and radish. But I couldn't resist an iteration I found in the new “Martha Stewart's Vegetables” (Clarkson Potter, 2016), a compendium of produce-centric (but not always vegetarian) recipes that includes invaluable tips on storage, selection, cooking, flavor pairings and more. Martha's fattoush combines crunchy fresh green beans with creamy shell beans, along with chopped sweet onion, cucumber, feta, mint and parsley.

The dressing isn't traditional, either: It's a simple, vibrant lemon-garlic concoction. But somehow, the sum total feels perfectly in sync with the salad's guiding principles: bread, crunch, tartness and summer.