How To Make A Great Salad Nicoise

Posted by Kerris Samson on June 13th, 2008 at 03:41pm

A Nicoise (pronounced Ni-Suaz) Salad originally comes for the Nice region of France and sometimes is more often referred to as the Salad Nicoise. Although a truly authentic version of this salad contains mainly raw ingredients (except for the eggs and anchovy fillets), there are some restaurants now who like to include other ingredients into their recipes. Some restaurants are now beginning to add pasta or potatoes or cheese, rice or cooked vegetables into theirs.

What is really great about this salad recipe over some of the others you see is just how simple and easy it is to prepare and just how great it looks once all the ingredients have been combined together. The Nicoise Salad is full of flavor, color and texture that you do not always see in a salad and this is simply because of the variety of ingredients that are used to make it. Below we provide you with a list of the ingredients you will need to make this great tasting salad. Plus we also provide step by step instructions on how to prepare it.

The ingredients you will need in order to make a Salad Nicoise to serve four people are as follows:- 1. 10 large and ripe tomatoes 2. 1 clove of garlic 3. 1 large cucumber 4. 1 green and one red pepper 5. 6 spring onions 6. 12 anchovy fillets which are in olive oil 7. 125g of black olives 8. 4 eggs that have been hard boiled 9. 90ml of olive oil (extra virgin is best) 10. 1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar 11. Juice of one lemon 12. Assorted salad leaves (cos, rocket etc) plus a small amount of fresh Basil. Now let us go through the steps you will need to take in order to make your Salad Nicoise.

Step 1 - take the tomatoes, cut this into six pieces each, place them in a dish, and sprinkle a little salt over them. Allow them to stand for around hour as this allows any juices to drain out of them. Whilst preparing the tomatoes you can put the eggs on to cook. It is best if you allow around 5 minutes once the water is boiling to ensure that the eggs are hard boiled.

Step 2 - You need to now take the cucumber and cut it in half down its complete length. After cutting in half take a spoon and scoop out as many of the seeds inside. Once you have removed as many of the seeds you need to then slice each half of the cucumber which has not been peeled up. Make sure that each slice you cut is not to thin or thick. After you have finished preparing the cucumber you can now slice up the peppers and the spring onions. It is best if you can slice these two ingredients for the salad as thinly as possible.

Step 3 - Now you need to take the garlic clove and remove the out skin and then cut it in half. Take the two halves of the garlic clove and rub them around the inside of the bowl or bowls into which the salad is going to be placed. Preferably use bowls which are made from wood as they are better able to hold the flavor and scent of the garlic.

Step 4 - Once you have rubbed the bowl with the garlic clove now you can start to take the ingredients and place them into it. First off get the salad leaves (which you will have washed and removed any excess water from) and lay these in the bottom of the bowl(s). Next on top of the leaves you lay the tomatoes followed by the eggs which have been cut into quarters. After the eggs you now need to lay on the slices of cucumber, spring onions and peppers and then on top of these you lay the anchovy fillets before you scatter over the olives.

Step 5 - The final step you need to take in order to make a great tasting Salad Nicoise is to prepare the dressing. So into a jug or jar place the olive oil, red wine vinegar and lemon juice and blend well together and also season it with a little freshly ground black pepper and salt. Once combined you just very gently drizzle this dressing over the top of the salad and before taking to the table to serve roughly tear up some of the basil leaves and scatter these over the top of it. Now take it to the table and enjoy.

Under Health and Fitness