This Week's Pick: Summer Tomato Salad With Sumac Onions
Summer Tomato Salad With Sumac Onions wins this week on its 15-minute prep, 12 five-star NYT Cooking ratings, generous 4-to-6-serving yield, and unusually low effort for a bright seasonal side.
The pick
Summer Tomato Salad With Sumac Onions is this week’s recipe to cook. It was published by NYT Cooking on July 14, takes 15 minutes, serves 4 to 6, and shows a 5.0 rating from 12 user ratings on the recipe page. 1
The appeal is straightforward: peak-season tomatoes do most of the work, while sumac gives the onion a lemony tang without adding lemon juice or vinegar. It is a no-cook side that can sit beside grilled chicken, fish, or a loaf of crusty bread. 1
Why it won this week
This was not the week’s biggest raw rating number. NYT Cooking’s Peaches and Cream Victoria Sandwich had 66 user ratings, but it also lists a two-hour ready time and a multi-part cake, compote, soak, and mascarpone-cream build. That is a worthwhile baking project, not the easiest answer for a reader deciding what to make now. 2
The tomato salad is the better balance of verified response and low friction: 12 five-star ratings, 15 minutes, five short preparation steps, and a yield large enough for a small table. Its only meaningful grocery-store hurdle is sumac; tomatoes, onion, oil, and the fresh herbs are otherwise familiar produce-aisle buys. 1
The quick route from counter to table
- Soak sliced red onion in ice water while you prep the tomatoes.
- Slice the large tomatoes and halve the cherry tomatoes, then arrange them on a wide platter.
- Season with salt and pepper and drizzle with olive oil.
- Add the herbs just before serving so they stay bright.
- Drain and dry the onion, toss it with sumac and salt, and scatter it over the tomatoes. 1
The recipe specifically calls for dill, cilantro, mint, basil, and sumac. If your market has only two or three of the herbs, the best move is to keep the combination fresh rather than substitute dried herbs: one reader’s note on the page calls fresh herbs essential, while another says extra sumac made the salad especially punchy. 1
What came close
- Cold Sesame Noodles With Smashed Cucumbers, NYT Cooking: 30 minutes, four servings, six user ratings, and a useful room-temperature window of up to four hours. It is the better desk-lunch option, but it asks for rice noodles, baked tofu, tahini, and several sauce ingredients. 3
- Spiced Brown Butter Tomatoes, Bon Appétit: a serious ease competitor, published July 13 with a 15-minute total time, four servings, and a short list built around heirloom tomatoes, butter, whole spices, and chile flakes. The recipe page did not show a public reader-rating count, so the engagement case is thinner than the NYT pick’s. 4
- Reddit’s meal-prep lane: the week’s highly visible posts included a burrito prep with 346 points and 53 comments, but its detail page contained no recipe text. A more cookable tofu, sweet-potato, and vegetable prep post had 113 points and 21 comments, yet it was a personal prep plan rather than one standalone recipe. That makes Reddit useful context for what the community is making, but not a cleaner pick for this week’s cook-now slot. 5 6
- Serious Eats: its July 17 feature recommends Chinese Lettuce With Oyster Sauce as a 15-minute dish, but the linked recipe was published in September 2025, so it was excluded from this week’s new-recipe ranking. 7 8
Bottom line
Buy the best tomatoes you can find, add sumac to the list if it is not already in your spice drawer, and make this for the next meal that needs a bright summer side. It is fast enough for a weeknight, generous enough for a weekend table, and simple enough that the quality of the produce—not a long technique list—decides the result.
References
- 1Summer Tomato Salad With Sumac Onions Recipe
- 2Peaches and Cream Victoria Sandwich Recipe
- 3Cold Sesame Noodles With Smashed Cucumbers Recipe
- 4Spiced Brown Butter Tomatoes Recipe
- 5Meal prepped my first burritos (Never cooked before ever)
- 6Friday prep because I work weekends
- 7This 15-Minute Chinese Lettuce Recipe Beats Salad Any Day
- 8Chinese Lettuce With Oyster Sauce
Related content
- Sign in to comment.