Turn Salad Into Delicious, Savory Granita With Help From Your Freezer

Granita is an Italian shaved ice food similar to the Japanese kakigori or Puerto Rican piragua. Rather than using flavored syrup, granita relies on freezing and then shaving fresh ingredients, usually having some mix of fruit, cream, nuts, sugar, and, of course, ice. While granita makes a sweet dessert with fruity ingredients, it's common as part of breakfast with nutty flavors of pistachio and almond. 

You can make a savory granita in several ways, and all you need is your choice of salad ingredients and a freezer. Level up your salad game by freezing whatever leftover greens you have in your home and grating it into a granita – whether it's a lush green bean and tomato panzanella salad or a sweet and savory hybrid like the deconstructed watermelon gazpacho salad. There are two main ways you can make a savory granita. The first is by shaving down frozen vegetables by themselves into a bowl. The second way, which will probably give you a more even flavor, is blending your salad first and then putting it in the freezer before shaving it.

Salty, savory granitas are nothing new, and what makes this dish different is what people eat with it: a brioche roll. You eat the dish by dipping the bread into the granita or scooping it on top of the bread. The refreshing granita is hydrating while the thick brioche helps fill you up — the perfect combination for hot Sicilian summers.

People tend to picture salty and savory flavors as reserved for warm meals, but Italians have been doing the cold and savory combination for years in their sandwiches, salads, and gazpachos. Think of your favorite Mediterranean flavors because there's likely a way to make a granita with all of them.

Blend, freeze, and grate tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil for a granita spin on Caprese salad. Turn pasta salad into a granita using cucumber, cherry tomato, red onion, bell pepper, and feta cheese. With all these examples, you can season them with salt and pepper and drizzle a touch of balsamic vinegar. As always, serve with your choice crispy bread roll and enjoy.

Italy isn't the only culture that has icy desserts with savory flavors. Southeast Asia is home to some savory-leaning desserts with unique choices of toppings and grass jelly, a bitter herbal and mint-like jelly made from the Chinese mesona plant. Malaysia has ais kacang, a shaved ice dessert using beans, grass jelly, sweet corn, and palm nuts — sweet additions include condensed milk, fruit, ice cream, or raisins. And es campur, from Indonesia, is a dessert with thicker ice chunks, grass jelly, jackfruit, palm seeds, and coconut. Desserts don't have to be all sweet, all the time.