Salads

To many North Americans, the notion of a grilled salad is an oxymoron. After all, isn’t the very essence of a salad its rawness—the refreshing cool crispness of the decidedly uncooked vegetables (lettuce, for example) that comprise it? Well, in many parts of the world salads are defined not by rawness but by the transformative powers of smoke and fire. Case in point, the roasted pepper salads of Morocco, Argentina, and Italy. Take a bite of an uncooked red bell pepper and you get a pleasant, if monodimensional, snappy sweetness. Char the same pepper over a wood fire, or roast it on the coals, and you get the haunting smoke and caramel flavors that are typical of complex wines. Or consider chicken salad: In Guam, the commonplace boiled chicken and mayonnaise give way to a robust grill-smoked chicken invigorated with crisp coconut, fiery chiles, and fresh lime juice. It may well be the world’s best chicken salad.