Persian · Salad
Salad-e Shirazi
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, acid holding everything up to the light, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 400 g small ridged cucumbers
- 400 g firm ripe tomatoes
- 100 g red onion
- 75 ml lime juice or verjuice
- 5 g dried mint
- 30 ml olive oil
- 6 g salt
- 2 g black pepper
The skills inside
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Quarter the tomatoes and scrape out the seed jelly, keeping only the firm walls.
- Cut the tomato walls, cucumber and onion into an even 5 mm dice; the uniformity is the dish.
- Rinse the diced onion under cold water and squeeze it dry in a cloth to pull the sulphurous heat out of it.
- Crush the dried mint between your palms into the lime juice and leave it 5 minutes to swell and go fragrant. 5 min
- Dress with the mint juice, oil, salt and pepper only as the bowl goes to the table, and toss just twice.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chianti Classico or Barbera d’Alba
- Also Right
- Vermentino for the lighter plates
- From the Taps
- Italian pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- San Pellegrino Sanbittèr
Tomato’s acid demands equal acid: Italian reds evolved beside the sauce, and the regional pairing is the safest law in wine.
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