Summer's most hydrating foods

There's a reason summer food feels lighter, and it isn't only the heat making heavy meals unappealing. The produce the season offers is genuinely full of water. Tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, berries, courgettes and salad leaves are all made mostly of it, often eighty or ninety per cent by weight, which means eating them tops you up at the same time as it feeds you. That's not a replacement for drinking, but on a hot day it's a real and pleasant contribution, and it's part of why a summer plate can be so satisfying without being filling. Here's what to reach for and how to keep it simple.

Tomatoes at their real peak

A summer tomato and a winter one are barely the same food. In season, grown in warmth and picked ripe, tomatoes are sweet, fragrant and heavy with juice — the difference is night and day from the pale, firm kind bred to survive a long winter journey. Treat them accordingly: at their best they need almost nothing, just salt and good oil, maybe a torn basil leaf. Slice them thick, let them sit a few minutes so the salt draws out their juice, and that liquid becomes half the pleasure. It's the clearest example on the whole calendar of why season matters.

Cucumber and courgette, the coolers

Cucumber is almost entirely water and does its best work raw and cold — in a yoghurt dip, in a sharp quick-pickle, or simply sliced with salt as the crunch on a hot-weather plate. Courgettes, arriving in summer gluts that can overwhelm a garden, are more flexible: griddled in slices, shaved raw into ribbons for a salad, or grated into fritters. Both are mild enough to carry stronger flavours, so they're the vehicles of summer cooking as much as the stars — the fresh, watery base a little acid and herb can lift.

Melon and berries

Melon is summer hydration at its most obvious — cool, sweet and dripping — and it needs no help beyond being properly ripe, which you can smell at the stem end of a good one. Berries are the other great summer treat: strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants and the rest arrive cheap and abundant exactly when they're at their best, and they fade fast, so this is the season to eat them daily rather than save them. Both are perfect as they are, but a little salt on melon or a squeeze of lemon over berries sharpens their sweetness in a way that's worth the ten seconds.

Eating light without eating little

The trick to summer cooking is to let the produce do most of the work and keep the kitchen cool. A plate of sliced tomatoes, some cucumber, a few olives, bread and cheese is a full meal that never touches the oven. Salads stop being a side and become the centre. And because so much of this food is water and freshness, you can eat generously and still feel light — which is exactly what the weather asks for. Buy what's in glut, keep it cold, dress it sharply, and let the season more or less cook itself.