This Week's Pick: Summer Tomato Salad With Sumac Onions

The pick

Why it won this week

The quick route from counter to table

1. Soak sliced red onion in ice water while you prep the tomatoes.
2. Slice the large tomatoes and halve the cherry tomatoes, then arrange them on a wide platter.
3. Season with salt and pepper and drizzle with olive oil.
4. Add the herbs just before serving so they stay bright.
5. Drain and dry the onion, toss it with sumac and salt, and scatter it over the tomatoes. 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. 56
• 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. 78

Bottom line