Russian & Ukrainian · Salad
Salat Olivier
- Easy
- 45 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, acid holding everything up to the light, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 4 waxy potatoes + 3 carrots, boiled in skins, cooled, peeled, diced FINE
- 4 eggs, hard-boiled, diced; 1 can peas, drained
- 4 dill pickles (brined, not vinegar, if you can), diced; 300g bologna-style sausage or poached chicken
- Mayonnaise: proper full-fat, folded not drowned
- Dill; and everything diced the SAME size, this is the exam
The skills inside
Brining & curingThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: egg
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
- Dice everything to neat pea-sized cubes: uniformity is the aesthetic and the texture.
- Fold together with pickles and peas.
- Mayonnaise in stages until bound but not swimming; salt, pepper, dill.
- Chill 2 h minimum: Olivier improves as the pickle brine wanders. Serve in a heap, at every New Year table, by law of tradition. 120 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
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
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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