Bitter Melon Salad
Photo: Carolina Ayala / Contributor
It’s taken decades of experimenting and tinkering for me to endure and appreciate the Indian bitter melon, a vegetable not easy to love. Knowing the vast nutritional benefits of eating bitter foods, I know we all need to incorporate more of them into our diets. So last week when Karen Man, the co-chef of the renowned now shuttered Oxheart restaurant walked into my house one morning for a cup of chai with a small container of a bitter melon salad, I mentally regarded it with mild suspicion and quickly placed it in the refrigerator, to be tried later. Raw bitter melon? I wasn’t so sure. That evening, I inhaled it in no time, beside myself with excitement. The Chinese bitter melon, I find out later, is not quite as bitter as the Indian karela and Karen had tossed in mango, onion, tomato and tempered it with a good dose of lemon juice, which removed the last vestiges of bitter and made the seeds edible.
So, I went about making my own version and just within the last week, I’ve made three different iterations and loved them all. I left out the fish sauce but put in a healthy dose of ginger. Another time, I tempered it with asafetida, which gave it the flavor of onions and garlic. Toss in a bunch of lettuce greens and/or herbs but do it just before you serve it. One of our favorite farmers, Armando Bustamante’s garden up in the Heights is bursting with local bitter melons – go pick some up at his table stand next time you are at the Urban Harvest Farmer’s Market. After eating that wonderful fresh salad, I’ll never think of bitter melon that same way again!