This salad could be a perfect first course dish in a original “Greek style” dinner. And please, do not listen to Zorba, once again. Greece is a country with great musicians. Start discovering them!
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 2 € pp)
- 2 large tomatoes
- Salt
- 1 large cucumber
- 1 medium onion
- A handful of black olives, NOT pitted
- EV olive oil
- Fresh oregano
Some cooks from France, friends of mine, asked me to make a classic Greek salad, not touristic as you may know it, but minimal and “haute”, as we can understand reading the following “10 COMMANDMENTS”!
1. Greek salad is not tapa or meze for sharing. Only tourists and Greek builders eat it like that. Everyone should have his own dish and dip his own bread in it. Considering that the salad is not the main course of the meal, it must be in a limited quantity.
2. Greek salad is a seasonal dish. We don´t prepare it if we don´t have first quality tomatoes. The tomatoes should be ripe and red, but not soft and watery. If they have hard green parts, we remove them.
3. We can peel the tomatoes if we have digestion problems. The skin of the tomato has no significant taste, is not well digestible and, above all, it causes the oil or the sauce to drop to the bottom of the dish, something we do not want.
4. We PRE-SALT the tomatoes for 15 minutes. ALWAYS. This is the most important thing. We remove and we keep tomato jelly and seeds.
5. The amount of cucumber should be less than that of tomato. We remove and throw away from the cucumber the jelly and the seeds, they offer us nothing but diluting the taste of the salad, turning it to watery.
6. We cut the onion into thin slices, but not too thin. We put them in ice water for 30 minutes to remove its caustic substances. By using red onions we have a better visual result.
7. We wash the olives well to remove the taste of the brine and to protect the overall color of the salad. Therefore, we do not remove the stone from the olives. Pitted industrial olives are a disaster for our preparation.
8. We don’t put peppers. They offer us nothing. They are semi-caustic and hardly digestible. I neither put cheese, thinking that its heavy “lactic” taste covers the delicate taste of the salad. But this is a personal matter.
9. We make a pseudo vinaigrette, mixing the oil and some salt with the jelly that we have kept. The oil should be EVO and not too sharp and aggressive.
10. We dry the ingredients well and put them on the plate. We add the “sauce” and the fresh herbs. Oregano is the most classic, but marjoram is a good alternative.
