Chewy, nutty-tasting bulgur wheat, just-picked summer vegetables, the refreshing zing of lemon juice, this is a cool side dish wheat salad using summer’s sweetest and juiciest at their peak.

Jane Ward, creator and writer for the Food and Fiction blog, puts the emphasis on “cool.”  According to her cooking bulgur is hardly cooking at all.  Bulgur is essentially a whole grain type of couscous.  Like couscous, bulgur is made from mostly durum wheat, but wheat that retains a good part of the outer husk of bran.  But unlike brown rice with its outer bran covering, Bulgur doesn’t need a long boil to cook.  The grains have been partially boiled and then dried before packaging so, as with Moroccan couscous, bulgur needs only to steam in order to complete the cooking process.

The quick cooking method, together with and a healthy addition of wonderful seasonal ingredients, make Toasted Bulgur Wheat Salad with Cherry Tomatoes, Scallions and Wilted Greens the perfect summer side dish.  The dish’s simplicity allows the toasted bulgur and the sweet farm produce to shine.  She recommends that you try other combinations of vegetables as the summer progresses.  Fresh corn cut off the cob also works very well with the tomatoes. 

You’ll find bulgur in bulk bins or often packaged in the rice aisle of your grocery store.  Loose, you may even find bulgur in a variety of grinds; fine, medium, coarse, and extra coarse.  The already packaged bulgur tends to be sold in the medium grain, which is fine for this recipe.

She specifies sea salt here because this is a dish where, when finished, the taste of the salt matters.  Every subtle flavor should be in balance, from the toast on the bulgur to the delicate flavors of the vegetables and the zip of citrus, and a clean tasting salt added at the finish will enhance these rather than overwhelm.  The flaky Maldon salt is wonderful but a finer grind sea salt will work too.