Tomato salad with raspberries

This fruity summer salad recipe has fresh tomatoes, peppers and raspberries in a tangy rosé wine dressing. A colourful, healthy side salad for a summer lunch.

Today’s recipe is inspired by the teeny, tiny tomatoes that have started growing on my own tomato plants. Unfortunately, they are not quite ready to make it into a salad – growing, as they do, on my balcony in the northern clime of Stockholm, Sweden – but they’re giving it a go.

The gorgeous grape tomatoes pictured are sourced from a delightful vegetable shop I discovered recently, and seeing them for the first time, I can’t help but think that they were put there to inspire me to keep on going with my own tomatoes. They may be small, but they can definitely be perfectly formed!

The combination of flavours here is inspired by my research into unusual food pairing – rosé wine, particularly Grenache, and tomatoes are said to make a particularly delightful combination. It is typically advised that you pair a very dry rosé wine with this fruit/vegetable, but I was only able to find a lightly sweet Grenache in my local shop and I thought the delicate, fruity sweetness matched extremely well with the tangy tomatoes.

I love the colours in this salad too – the pink and orange and red are so bright and joyful. Perfect for summer, and perfect to remind you of the energetic loveliness of fresh fruit and vegetables, and the life-giving nutrition they offer.

Raspberries are also a good match for the other flavours in this salad. I think raspberries are fantastic in savoury dishes, particularly salads (check out another salad recipe of mine, Carrot Salad with Avocado, Raspberries & Hazelnuts). They are not particularly sweet and add little bursts of concentrated, juicy, tart, fruity flavour. I used fresh raspberries here, but I think frozen is fine too. You can defrost them and use the excess juices to add a little something to the dressing, or keep them frozen as a textural and temperature contrast.

I used a tiny touch of vinegar in the dressing. Just a little, to make it a bit more dressing-like, but not enough to completely obliterate the delicate flavours of the wine. I went for raspberry vinegar here, as I have an enormous collection of vinegars and it seemed the most appropriate. Vinegars are great to collect, as they don’t really spoil – because, let’s face it, it’s quite hard to work your way through several bottles. They have so many subtly different flavours, aroma and colours. Just the kind of thing that get me really excited about cooking. Perhaps I need to get out more.