Weekly Recipe: Citrus Salad with XO Sauce by Fat Choy

Interested in a more plant-based lifestyle but afraid of losing flavor? Looking to spice up your go-to salad lunch? Maybe you're interesting in a citrus treat for the season. This week's recipe hits all those marks and then some.

Fat Choy is a restaurant in New York City wowing customers with its inventive, flavorful and totally vegan Chinese dishes. The menu offers everything from sticky rice dumplings to salt and pepper cauliflower rice rolls, but today, we're sharing the recipe for Fat Choy's popular and vibrant seasonal citrus salad.

See also: Weekly Recipe: Wagyu Gyoza by Kumi

This delightful dish incorporates sumo oranges, a special fruit with Japanese origins. These oranges are bigger than your usual grocery store fare and are named for the little top-knot bump on their head.

Fat Choy Chef and Owner Justin Lee combines sumo oranges with tangerines, nagami kumquats with castelvetrano olives, lemon juice and scallions to create. The recipe also calls for a home-made XO sauce made from minced or food-processed ginger, garlic and scallions slowly cooked in olive oil with whole dried chili, dried citrus peel, smoked pimenton, salt, sugar and monosodium glutamate (msg).

Enough talk about the dish, let’s learn how to actually make it!

Citrus Salad with XO

Ingredients

XO Sauce

• 3 tbsp ginger, peeled and minced/food processed
• 2 tbsp garlic, peeled and minced/food processed
• 2 tbsp scallion, thinly sliced
• 1 dried citrus peel - can sub some fresh zest as it'll be more readily available
• 1 whole dried Tianjin chili or chili de arbol
• 1 tsp smoked Pimenton/paprika
• 1 tsp salt
• ½ tsp msg
• ⅓ tsp sugar
• Oil to cover

Salad

• 1 sumo orange
• 1 navel orange
• 6 kumquats
• ¼ grapefruit
• 6 Castelvetrano olives, pitted
• 1 scallion, sliced thinly on a bias

Directions

1. Place everything in a small pot and just barely cover with oil. Cook very gently over low heat, stirring frequently so as not to burn anything.
2. After about an hour, the ginger, garlic and scallion will be dehydrated and crispy. Remove from the heat and discard large chunks of citrus peel and the chili.
3. Peel and cut the sumo orange, navel orange and grapefruit into large but bite-size pieces.
4. Without peeling, quarter cut the kumquats and remove any seeds, and quarter cut the Castelvetrano olives.
5. Arrange everything on a plate and dress with room temperature XO sauce, then top with bias sliced scallions. Note, there will be excess XO for subsequent salads.
6. Enjoy!