Father’s day recipes: Chef Adam Byatt and daughter Rosie share the Greek salad and watermelon ices they make together

I have always used food and the kitchen to bond with my children from a very young age, it just feels natural to me to be doing something practical with them that creates a safe space to chat and have fun – and they get to eat at the end of it, which always helps.

My son Jack, now 17, came to work with me at Trinity from a very young age; it was about carving out pockets of time and making him feel comfortable around the restaurant and with food.

Rosie, my 13-year-old, has always cooked with me and is now incredibly competent and happy pottering around the kitchen. In my book How To Eat In, I wrote that there is no better skill for life than teaching your little ones to feed themselves well. I still believe it.

Food and restaurants are our life and as a family – when we are together, we are either in one of our restaurants, cooking or eating together, which I love. Below is a dish we often make together – it takes a little preparation, so it gives us some good family time – with Rosie’s watermelon ice pops, which we always have after.

Trinity Greek Salad

Makes: 8 servings

Ingredients

For the confit lemon

• 1 lemon, zest finely diced

• 100g white wine vinegar

• 100g sugar

• 100g water

For the consommé

• 1 cucumber, roughly chopped

• 10 ripe San Marzano tomatoes

• 1 tsp oregano

• 1 large red onion, roughly chopped

• 20 black olives, washed and pitted

• 150g feta cheese

• 25g rock salt

• 150ml olive oil

For the tapenade

• 100g black olives

• 2 anchovies

• 20g capers

For the salad

• 400g watermelon, half cut into batons, half scooped into Parisienne balls

• 1 cucumber, scooped into balls

• 2 Grelot onions, sliced into rings

• 16 San Marzano tomatoes

• 200g Graceburn cheese

• 4 tsp fresh oregano

• 240g olive oil

• 24 San Marzano tomatoes

Preparation

1. Finely dice the zest of one lemon and put it to one side. Bring the water, sugar and white wine vinegar to the boil, remove from the heat and allow to cool. Once cooled, place the finely diced lemon zest into this pickling liquor and leave it for two days.

2. Make the consommé by combining all of its ingredients to form a rough Greek salad. Use a rolling pin or pestle and mortar, crush the ingredients down – they don’t need to be chopped any further – then place grease-proof paper on top and, to press them, add a weight (this could be a plate or a carton of milk). This should be just enough to press the vegetables and allow them to bleed out their naturals juices. The next day, pour all of that liquid through a double muslin cloth and reserve the consommé to one side.

3. Make the tapenade by blending 100g black olives with two anchovies and 20g capers with a pinch of oregano and a dash of olive oil. Blend until a smooth paste has formed and reserve until needed.

Tips, tricks and method

We all know that Greek salad is really all about great tomatoes, lovely cucumbers, olives, feta cheese, great olive oil, red onions and oregano – that’s the foundation. But I think that it’s the consommé that takes this dish to another level; as step two, above, explains, we make a very rough, rustic Greek salad, and we mash all of that together before leaving it to marinate for two days. Then we press the lovely liquid through a muslin cloth, and what comes out is a completely clear, natural juice of Greek salad, which we retain to pour into the finished dish at the very end.

There’s one other element to this dish that which I think brings it to another level, and that’s the watermelon, but we only use this in the summer when watermelons are super sweet and beautiful. There’s no watermelon in the consommé though; we take watermelon and cut it into batons about 1cm square and we compress the watermelon in a vacuum pack machine. What this does is, it allows the watermelon to become firmer and have a much nicer texture – but if you don’t have a vacuum packer at home, it’s the end of the world.

Feta will work in a classic Greek salad, but we don’t use it, apart from in the consummé. Instead, we use an English cheese called Graceburn, which is made in South London; it has a very similar texture to feta, but it is less acidic and creamier. We take the olives to a new level, too, by dehydrating them until they’re really crispy before breaking them up, so we’re left with a black olive crumb. You can dehydrate at home using your oven; pop the olives on a sheet of baking paper, turn the oven right down to about 50-60C, if you can (if not, leave the door slightly ajar to let the temperature drop); it’ll take about eight hours, but it’s worth it.

For the tomatoes, we take beautiful San Marzano tomatoes and blanch them for 10 seconds before peeling. We then cut them into 1cm thick slices, squeeze a little bit of confit lemon over the top of them before we dehydrate them, until they’re shrivelled slightly.

To bring the dish together on the plate, place the batons of watermelon into the centre of the plate along with the balls of cucumber, and small balls of watermelon. Then add a spoonful of olive tapenade, followed by a larger helping of Graceburn cheese (25g per plate).

Finally, per dish, add five slices of the lovely San Marzano tomatoes, along the little rings of Grelot onions and the black olive crumb. Then dress the whole dish with home-dried oregano and lots of lovely good-quality extra virgin olive oil. To finish, pour the consommé over the top and settle down with the family to tuck in.

Rosie’s watermelon ice pops

As Dad is making the Greek salad, he made balls with the cucumber and watermelon which left lots of trimmings – which I think is wasteful (Dad...)

I place 150g of watermelon, 50g of cucumber, the juice of one lime and 10g sugar into our bullet blender and add a few springs of mint from the garden, which grows behind my chicken’s pen.

I blend this for two minutes and pour it into four sandwich bags, tipping the liquid to one corner and placing a wooden skewer into the mix. I usually tie the bag with an elastic band, but you could use a hair band.

Next, put the sandwich bags in the freezer overnight. The next day you can just peel away the bag and have a lovely ice pop, a delicious and healthy snack.

by Rosie Byatt

Adam Byatt is the chef-proprietor of Trinity, in Clapham. He is also the chef-director of food and beverage at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, where he looks after Charlie’s.

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