Fruits, such as peaches, apples, apricots, figs, strawberries and many more can be used as part of great dishes. Build your own salad with the fruits you keep in your fridge.
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 3 € pp, it can be much cheaper if the jamón used, is not ibérico)
- Salt
- Pepper
- 100 ml EV olive oil
- 30 ml balsamic or other good quality vinegar
- 4 big slices of Iberian ham
- A few raspberries, better fresh of course
- 4 handfuls of purslane
- 2 large peaches, not too ripe
This is a magnificent and very rapid to cook dish, which will bring to your mind summer memories. The purslane can be found in every garden during August and September, so the only thing we have to make sure of is to select green and tender leaves and discard the hard stalks.
The peaches have to be firm, so we have to avoid the very ripe and very juicy ones and to cook them (halved) just for 5 to 10 minutes at 200 C in order to make them relatively soft and easily eatable. A sous vide cooking produces excellent results, but turns the dish to more complicate.
The classic French dish “Pêche Melba” informs us about the greatness of the peach – raspberries combination, so we use our knowledge to produce a similar vinaigrette for the purslane. We first prepare a classic vinaigrette, beating the salt in the vinegar with a whisk and adding the oil slowly. We finish with pepper. We then cut roughly the raspberries and let them infuse for half an hour in the vinaigrette. If we cannot find berries we can substitute the common vinegar with a raspberry one, but the result will not be the same.
Something very important. We ALWAYS fry jamón, prosciutto, pancetta and all the cold cuts starting from cold pan, in order to avoid the alteration of the aromas, result of a sudden change of fat temperature. So, we slowly fry the Iberian ham, just to make it (not very) crispy.
That´s all (folks).
We just have to serve our magnificent salad and enjoy it with a glass of white wine.
