This is a great Christmas salad, full of winter vegetables
ingredients for 4 individual salads (cost about 2€ pp)
- 2 escaroles
- 1 medium to large cauliflower
- 1 medium fennel root
- 2 medium carrots
- 4 medium red radishes
- 2 medium yellow peppers
- 2 medium red peppers
- 12 black olives
- 12 green olives
- EV Olive oil
- Vinegar from white wine
- Salt
- Colatura di alici (optional)
This salad has the strange name “reinforcement” salad, because the leftovers of cauliflower are reinforced the next days with other ingredients. According to the Neapolitan tradition every guest must eat it, it will be something like a sin, if he doesn’t. What can I say, about it? I love the Neapolitan way of life.
This salad is usually made without escarole or other green leaf vegetables but many Neapolitan cooks use them, in order to lower the acidic taste of the salad. In Naples the peppers and the carrots often come from industrial conserves “sotto aceto”, which means in vinegar. As in my cuisine I don’t use ready made products I make my own vegetables in vinegar.
But let’s start.
First of all we must prepare the acidic parts of the salad. The are two ways:
a) To prepare our own vegetables in vinegar with the normal way. Which means that during the summer, when the peppers are still cheap we buy a lot of them, we wash and trim them, we remove the internal seeds and we cut them in halves.
We blanch them in boiling salted water for 2 minutes and we then let them dry over a strainer for about 4 hours. We pat them completely dry with paper and we put them in glass jars along with a solution made of 60% vinegar and 40% water. We sterilize (although many insist that the large amount of vinegar kills all possible bacteria) and we keep the jars in a cool place for at least a month.
We do the same (cleaning, trimming, cutting, boiling, drying and put them in vinegar) with the carrots, the radishes and the fennel roots.
But not many people do all this preparation. So, follow the second option.
b) We follow the above procedure of washing, trimming, blanching and straining the vegetables. Then if we have a sous vide machine, like the Foodsaver we put the vegetables in a bag, we fill the bag with the vinegar solution and we remove the air with the machine. The sub-pressure provokes by the air removal, facilitates the osmosis between liquid and solid products and helps us preparing vegetables in vinegar in a moment.
If you don’t have a sous vide machine follow the initial procedure and just leave the vegetables in vinegar overnight.
Having the peripheral vegetables ready we proceed to the next parts of the salad.
We put the olives in cold water to remove their excessive saltiness. We leave them for at least one hour. I didn’t remove the olives pit as I preferred have them wholes for visual reasons, but if you like you can pit them, but using already pitted commercial olives is forbidden.
We cut the cauliflower in florets and we blanch them in salted water for 2-3 minutes, no more, as we want the cauliflower cooked but still firm. We wash and drain the escarole. We use only the central tender leaves, keeping the outer harder ones for other use.
In 4 plates we spread tender escarole leaves and above them we place cauliflower florets, peppers and radishes cut in pieces, carrots and fennel roots, cut in slices, green and black olives.
We drizzle with top quality olive oil and if we have with drops of colatura di alici and we serve.
If we want to use the whole escarole, we can blanch it and prepare a variation, as you can see at the following photo.
