The most important thing in a Greek salad is fresh ingredients, not cutting or serving. Greeks usually cut their salad into large chunks, and put olives right with the stone, and Greek, with a buttery taste. The main herb in the salad is oregano and a little basil is taken.
Often cucumbers, shallots, olive oil are used in the salad. In general, various tricks and variations are allowed here. After all, a Greek salad is a simple version of a rustic salad made with the most basic ingredients found in every rustic home.
Often, instead of shallots in recipes, sweet lettuce or even ordinary onions are taken. Olive oil can be replaced with sunflower oil. Olives, olives are better to take pitted. If there is no oregano and basil, they can be replaced with simple lettuce leaves or any fresh herbs from the garden - the main thing is that it will be a summer and light salad.
An important ingredient, feta cheese, can be found everywhere today, but in extreme cases it can be replaced with Adyghe cheese, brynza.
Greek salad according to the classic recipe
Ingredients:
- cucumber - 2 pcs.;
- bell pepper - 1 pc.;
- tomato with dense pulp - 2 pcs.;
- Crimean blue onion of medium size - 1 pc.;
- olives and olives large and pitted - 20 pcs.;
- olive oil - 2-3 tbsp. l.;
- feta cheese - 80-100 gr.;
- oregano - ½ tsp dry grass;
- lemon juice - 1-1.5 tbsp. l.;
- salt, pepper - to taste.
Cooking process
Wash all vegetables. Cut cucumbers and tomatoes into large pieces (2-2.5 cm). Cucumbers can be pre-peeled if the peel is too hard.
Chop the blue onion into half rings. Peel the peppers from seeds and white membranes, cut into squares of 2-2.5 cm. Olives and olives can be left whole or cut in half.
Pour the vegetables into a salad bowl, salt and pepper to taste. Gently mix everything with two large spatulas.
Beat olive oil with lemon juice, add oregano to it, slightly rubbing the grass with your fingers. Dress the salad with the resulting dressing.
Cut the feta cheese into large pieces, similar to vegetables, and put on top of the salad. Throw a pinch of oregano on top. Salad ready.
It is allowed to replace part of the onion with garlic in the salad, but the cloves will have to be chopped with a knife into a small cube.
Options for preparing ingredients for Greek salad
Onion
Greek Salad Onion Onions can be marinated before adding to the salad. The easiest way is to chop the onion and pour it with a mixture of vinegar (3 parts) and sugar (2 parts) with a pinch of salt. Let stand for half an hour, drain in a colander and add to other vegetables.
To reduce bitterness, you can cut the onion smaller or mix two varieties - white and blue onions in the desired ratio of 1:2 or 1:1.
cucumbers
Greek Salad Cucumbers Cucumbers can be cut figured or, for example, alternating pieces with peeled and left. Looks beautiful in a zebra cucumber salad when each piece in the salad looks white and green.
Tomatoes
Greek Salad Tomatoes With tomatoes, it is better to experiment not with cutting, but with a combination of different varieties and colors. Cherry tomatoes look great in a salad. They need to be cut in half. The colors combine well with red and orange fruits. It looks spectacular, besides, rich and low-acid orange tomatoes will give the salad meatiness, reducing sourness. If desired, tomatoes can even be peeled by scalding with boiling water.
Pepper
Peppers for Greek Salad With pepper, a multi-color option is also suitable. In this case, it is better to cut the fruits of different colors into a thin strip, and not into cubes. For lovers of experiments, there is an unusual idea: peel the vegetable with a sharp knife or piller. This option is for those who want to add sublimity and delicate taste to the dish, it is also perfect for serving Greek salad on the festive table.
What to substitute for feta cheese
Usually in Russian cuisine, feta cheese is replaced by salted cheese, a product made from goat's milk is especially suitable.
In extreme cases, you can take large pieces of processed cheese with a strong flavor of greens or smoked meats. Salad in this case, you need a little more salt.
Another version of Greek salad is with Dutch cheese. Only the pieces need to be made smaller. This recipe is no longer a classic, but it may well be liked, especially by men.
How to dress a Greek salad
A classic Greek salad is dressed with a mixture of lemon juice, olive oil, and fresh or dried oregano. But if for some reason you cannot find these components or you already want to diversify the taste of your favorite dish, the option of mixing other seasonings and herbs is also allowed. For example, coarsely torn lettuce leaves of different varieties (curly, Iceberg), chopped wild garlic strips can be added to the dish. According to your taste, you can include thyme and parsley in the dish.
As a bold idea, hostesses who love experiments can be offered to fill a serving of Greek salad with honey-mustard sauce.
Honey mustard sauce: an unusual and tasty dressing option
Take in a ratio of 1: 1: 2 mustard of medium or low pungency (possible with grains), honey and olive oil. Mix everything and beat with a whisk. If the sauce is too thick, add more oil. Serve with salad in a separate sauceboat.
Also dressing for Greek salad can be varied by adding other oils (mustard, corn, sesame), bread crumbs or toasted salty croutons for flavor. Lovers of a strong taste can put garlic, passed through a garlic press, into the sauce.
If you have used lightly salted cheese, such as feta cheese or Dutch cheese, for your salad, try using the dressing recipe with soy sauce, which is traditionally salty and rich.
Ingredients:
- olive oil - 2 tbsp. spoons;
- soy sauce - 1 tbsp. a spoon;
- apple cider vinegar - 1 tbsp. a spoon;
- mustard (medium or low pungency) - 1 teaspoon.
To prepare the sauce, whisk together all the ingredients. Serve the dressing separately in a gravy boat.
Greek salad with oregano, dill and mint: a step by step recipe
Ingredients:
- cucumber - 2 pcs.;
- cherry tomatoes - 300 gr.;
- sweet yellow pepper - 1 pc.;
- olives and handful olives;
- mint leaves - to taste;
- wine vinegar (can be replaced with apple cider vinegar) - 1 tbsp. l.;
- vegetable oil - 3 tbsp. l.;
- oregano - 1 tsp;
- salt - to taste;
- lettuce onion - 1 head;
- dill and lettuce - to taste;
- feta cheese - 200-300 g.
Cooking process
Wash all vegetables and pat dry to remove excess water. Cut cucumbers into medium pieces. Cut cherry tomatoes in half or quarters. Arrange cucumbers and tomatoes in a deep dish.
Pepper cut into large strips. It is advisable to take yellow peppers so that the colors in the dish combine beautifully.
Add pepper to cucumbers and tomatoes. Cut the onion into thin half rings and disassemble into thin strips. Add to the dish, mix everything gently.
Finely chop mint leaves, dill and other herbs, add to the total mass in the dish. Salad, pepper, put olives or olives, mix everything.
Salad dressing preparation
Pour 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil (or other vegetable oil) into a deep bowl, add a teaspoon of wine vinegar to it. Stir and add half a teaspoon of oregano. Mix everything thoroughly.
Season the salad with the prepared dressing, leaving a little, a little more than a teaspoon. Mix salad.
Arrange lettuce leaves on a serving dish, put half of the entire mass of vegetables from the bowl on them. Spread the salad evenly throughout the dish.
Cut the cheese into cubes according to the size of the olives. Put some of the cheese in a cup with the remaining dressing and roll the cheese in it, so the pieces will not stick together. Plus, these pieces look great.
Gently place the cheese with part of the dressing on a dish with half of the salad. Place the second half of the mass of vegetables on top of the cheese. Smooth everything out carefully. Put the remaining cheese into the bowl where the salad was, add a spoonful of olive oil, sprinkle oregano on top and mix everything.
Put the cheese with oregano in the salad, spread it over the surface. Sprinkle a little oregano on top of the salad. In total, the entire salad will take about 1 teaspoon of oregano. Serve Greek salad on the table.
You can decorate the salad with a mint leaf. Tricks and options for serving Greek salad
An interesting portion serving salad, practiced in restaurants in Greece. It is extremely laconic: the client receives a deep plate of vegetables, where there is no sliced cheese. All the cheese lies in one piece on top of the vegetable slices. Thus, the client himself decides how he will eat it.
Similarly, the sauce is now almost always served in a separate container for each serving. So everyone will determine for himself how much and when he needs to add dressing to the Greek salad.
It is very convenient for the owner. As long as the salad is not seasoned with sauce, it keeps better. You can cut vegetables a few hours before the guests arrive, and pour the sauce over just before serving. Moreover, if possible, you need to season the salad after portion serving, so that guests do not suffer with putting salad on their plates and distributing the sauce.
Sometimes very large pieces of vegetables and cheese are mixed in a salad without much mixing. Many do not like serving in large pieces, but it has its advantages: those who do not like onions or olives will easily remove them.
Brilliant simple! It is with these words that one can characterize the Greek salad prepared according to the classic recipe.
Preparing a Greek salad is incredibly quick and easy, and the ingredients for the salad require the most common and accessible to everyone.
But what is the secret of Greek salad?! And I will tell you his secret! It is contained in juicy, ripe and fragrant seasonal vegetables that are used to prepare the salad and in perfectly matched ingredients and proportions. Vegetables for Greek salad are cut into fairly large pieces.
And you can easily cook a Greek salad at home, thanks to step-by-step photos, subtleties and secrets that I generously share with you on the pages of our website. And believe me, your Greek salad will turn out tastier than in a restaurant!
Let's start cooking!
And admit, are there many Greek salad lovers among you and how often do you cook this salad at home or do you prefer to order it in a restaurant?
Also, you may like the Shopsky salad, similar in composition, but slightly different in preparation technology. - this salad is not of Greek, but of Bulgarian origin, but it also turns out to be unusually tasty and easy to prepare. It differs from the Greek one in that the pepper for Shopska salad is baked, and thanks to this, the salad turns out with a very interesting taste.
Ingredients
| tomatoes | 3 pcs |
|---|---|
| cucumbers (small) | 2-3 pcs |
| red sweet lettuce (can be replaced with onions) | 0.5-1 pcs |
| bell pepper (green or yellow) | 1 PC |
| olives (b/c) | 2-3 tbsp |
| cheese or feta | 100-150 g |
| olive oil | 2 tbsp |
| red wine vinegar (can be replaced with lemon juice) | 2 tbsp |
| oregano (dried) | |
| salt | |
| freshly ground pepper |
Let's start with the incredible: Greece has everything except… Greek salad! No, of course, in numerous restaurants aimed at welcoming and entertaining foreign tourists, the staff have learned well that the question of whether they have the above-named salad on the menu should be answered in the affirmative and at the same time vigorously nod your head to hide your own attitude to such a widespread myth. However, the truth is that what we call Greek salad, in Greece itself (as well as many other Mediterranean countries) is called dozens of different names, among which there is not only the one we are used to.
The most common local "name" a hero has of today's article - "village salad" (in the original language - χωριάτικη σαλάτα, "horiatiki salad"), which very eloquently, accurately and fully reflects the essence of the treat served to guests: natural products, affordable, delicious in quality. The second common name is banal and obvious: vegetable salad. However, they say that over the past few decades, the Greeks have come into use with another name for Greek salad - Russian salad: apparently, our compatriots order it en masse in restaurants, firmly linking the Greek dish with their own customs.
To avoid further confusion, let's just agree that let's allow ourselves to make allowances for our own traditions and call a dish of fresh vegetables and cheese, which is widely prepared in the Mediterranean countries, a Greek salad, however, at the same time, we will certainly begin to keep a small notch in our minds as a memory of how it should be properly called.
So, let's go through the basic components of a Greek salad? special the value of this dish is due to the fact that it contains almost everything that a person needs: proteins, fats, carbohydrates. A portion of a delicious salad, rich in taste and charming in its color saturation - and we can assume that a full meal has taken place. The salad recipe is optimal: such a dinner not only gives a feeling of satiety for a long time, but also normalizes metabolism, gently cleanses the intestines, saturates the body with useful substances and microelements.
Greek Salad Ingredients
Tomatoes
If you think that a Greek salad can be made from semi-plastic greenhouse tomatoes without taste and smell, which lie in even beautiful rows on supermarket shelves, you are committing a crime against the entire Greek culture of healthy eating.
A prerequisite for a real Greek salad is fragrant tomatoes grown in open ground, better - farm or village. Ideal - tomatoes grown with their own hands in their own garden.
There are no restrictions on the variety of tomatoes. Depending on your personal preferences, you can take fleshy red tomatoes, juicy pink ones, rich black ones, discreet yellow ones.
cucumbers
The rule regarding the method of growing tomatoes is equally true for cucumbers: the fruits must be fresh, firm, juicy and very fragrant. Sluggish green sticks, which modern stores offer in abundance, are categorically not suitable for Greek salad.
If a crazy thought runs through your head to peel the fruit from the skin, take a good old broom and drive it away. No self-respecting Greek would deprive cucumbers of their important component!
bell pepper
Again, remember that Greek salad is a rustic and simple dish, and we pass by the perfect bell peppers, which can be purchased at the supermarket. In the absence of access to personal gardening, the destination is the farmers' market, where grannies with shopping bags, strong grandfathers on bicycles, lively ruddy young ladies in colorful scarves come together.
Choose elastic fruits with a fresh stalk: if it is grafted, this signals that the pepper was plucked a few days, or even weeks ago. They can be used for stuffing or making sauces, but as a component of a Greek salad, they are completely unsuitable.
Feta
Do you want to make a Greek salad or a Greek-like salad? This point is very important when it comes to cheese. The fact is that, according to the decision approved in 2007 in the EU, only cheese of Greek origin, made from cow's or sheep's milk, can be called feta. Anything you buy from stores with that name that isn't made in Greece is not feta.
Thus, it turns out that an authentic Greek salad can only be prepared using cheese brought from a distant and sunny country on the Mediterranean coast. You can buy real feta in supermarkets, but few people dare to spend a lot of money on something that has domestic counterparts that are no less worthy and of high quality. Which cheese to buy to make a real Greek salad is, of course, up to you.
Olives
To prepare a Greek salad, you will need high-quality pitted olives. When choosing a product, try to do without canned something in metal cans with attractive labels, look for small shops specializing in the sale of goods from Italy or Greece - these are the shops where you can buy pickled olives and olives of the highest quality. You want juicy, firm fruits that are a beautiful chocolate color with a prominent eggplant hue. The stuffed versions are good and tasty, but not at all suitable for making a real Greek salad.
Olive oil
Many well-known chefs believe that high-quality olive oil is a third of the key to success: it is it that unites the disparate components into a single whole, enveloping them with the extraordinary spirit of the Mediterranean. Naturally, we are talking about extra virgin olive oil, which is obtained by mechanical pressing.
This oil does not contain any additives, has a rich taste and aroma and is extremely beneficial for human health. Please note that the color of Extra Virgin Olive Oil should not be close to yellow and amber tones, it is more green - thick, rich and grassy. The taste of this oil is very characteristic - it is barely perceptibly bitter, deafens with a mixture of salty, sour and sweet, strikes with richness, surprises with subtlety.
Onion
Knowledgeable people say that a lot of the perfect taste of Greek salad depends on how you cook the onions. Yes, yes, just cook - there are a lot of Greek salad recipes on the Internet, but only a few sources open the veil and say that before adding onions to the salad, bitterness, stiffness and anger should be removed from it. The taste of this dish should make you love the world and rejoice in people, so the onion needs to be peeled, cut into rings and put for a couple of minutes in the marinade prepared in advance: a little hot water, salt, a spoonful of sugar. When taking the onion out of the marinade, in no case do we squeeze it and do not deform it, it should remain whole and beautiful.
oregano
Oregano is a staple Greek culinary herb and is added wherever possible - many Greek dishes have an "oregano" flavor to them. Of course, you can season the salad with Italian basil, French rosemary or Georgian cilantro, but it will not be quite a Greek salad, or even not a Greek salad at all. Oregano (although it is nothing more than oregano) is a magical herb, do not neglect it if you decide to experience the true taste of an authentic classic dish.
Classic Greek salad recipe
Of course, it is not necessary to talk about some clear recipe with the exact amount of each ingredient, however, a certain formula-proportion can be deduced. The basic recipe for Greek salad is needed for orientation - having felt the overall balance of the components, you can experiment and play with additives to your own taste.Ingredients:
- 1 cucumber;
- 1 tomato;
- 1/3 bell pepper;
- 1/2 blue onion;
- 5-7 olives;
- 80 g of feta;
- salt, a pinch of dry oregano;
- 50 ml olive oil.
Cooking
- My vegetables, cut them into large pieces. Put in a salad bowl.
- Peel the onion, cut into half rings, pickle a little if desired. Put in a salad bowl.
- Add olives without brine.
- Salt. Mix carefully.
- Put a few slices of cheese on top of the vegetables. Even more correctly - solid - one! - a chunk. It's an old village tradition. It differs from the modern fast food style of cutting feta into cubes.
- Sprinkle with oregano.
- Drizzle the salad generously with olive oil and serve. Maybe with a slice of lemon.
Greek salad dressings and dressings
The classic Greek salad is dressed with the highest quality olive oil, however, variations are allowed that diversify the taste of the salad, make it interesting and unusual.
Try making a dressing based on olive oil and lemon juice. You can add some white wine and balsamic vinegar. A drop of honey, soy sauce, narsharab, a little grain mustard, orange peel will make the dressing even more original.
The main rule for making salad dressing is that the sauce should be very rich in taste, but pleasant. If you have prepared a dressing, but you don’t like it (yes, yes, you must try it first!), The salad will not fix it, rather, it will ruin the salad itself.
Ways to diversify a classic recipe
There are many options that allow you to diversify the usual rustic salad. In some recipes, it certainly includes leaf lettuce. Lightly salted salmon and canned tuna, boiled cold pasta and baked bell peppers, cooked lentils and raw cauliflower, capers and anchovies, avocados and mushrooms - everyone chooses additives according to their taste and wallet.
By the way, another option is endive leaves. They are good not only for an additional flavor note - they are very cool to serve a salad in a portion. It turns out unusual and stylish.
Feed Options
Greek salad is so popular all over the world that numerous experiments in serving it became quite a natural course of development of this dish.
Many chefs of famous restaurants build "turrets" of vegetables, alternating them with cheese. There is a serving in “boats” of bell pepper or lettuce, in pita bread and on toasted slices of bread, in small glasses in the manner of verrins and huge bowls, the contents of which can feed half of China.
Vegetables are laid out on a plate in bright multi-colored rows, alternated in appetizing layers in a salad bowl, roughly cut into a couple of parts, neatly cut into small cubes - there are a lot of options for serving Greek salad, and it seems that every day chefs from all over the Earth come up with new and new interesting ways to treat their guests with a delicious dish of fresh vegetables and tender soft cheese.
5 rules of real Greek salad
Summing up, I would like to write separately about the basic and very important rules, without which you will cook anything, but not a Greek salad.1. The ingredients for the rustic Greek salad are cut into large pieces. No, not just large, but as large as possible - they should hide the maximum taste in themselves, plus it is unacceptable to spend more than 5 minutes on preparing the most ordinary everyday dish.
2. Do you make salad for yourself and your family? Then put your doubts aside– and mix the contents of the bowl with your hands. Ru-ka-mi! This will not only add soulfulness to the salad, but also allow you to keep the vegetables whole without crushing or even crushing them.
3. When adding olive oil, you should not only pay attention to its quality (only the best, only proven!), but also on its quantity. The canonical Greek salad should be oily, very oily - no real Greek woman would spare olive oil, because she knows that after the salad bowl is empty, there will be delicious "juice" from vegetables, cheese and dressing at the bottom. Greeks dip slices of freshly baked bread into this liquid and enjoy the extraordinary taste of homemade food.
By the way, for this process, the inventive people of a sunny country even invented a separate word - “ladobukies” (“oil pieces”), which means a completely indecent, but incredibly savory soaking of bread in salad sauce.
4. Don't cut the cheese. Limit yourself to one large slice, which is laid out on top of vegetables. So more beautiful, tastier and more "Greek".
5. Greek salad is prepared immediately before being served, and after serving, it is eaten immediately. He does not need to infuse, the products should be as fresh as possible and just chopped.
The History of Greek Salad
They say that the birth of lettuce falls on the 20-30s of the 19th century. The fact is that tomatoes, one of the main components of Greek salad, appeared on the territory of this country only in 1818 - and it was after they almost instantly gained popularity and popular love that they began to be used in salads.
However, history claims that it was only a prototype of the modern Greek salad - let's say, its distant genetic ancestor, no more. At the time when the first tomatoes and onions appeared in Greece, these vegetables were not cut into pieces, but were eaten exclusively whole. Only almost a century later, with another wave of emigrants, one of the Greeks came to the United States, who guessed to cook their favorite dish in a slightly modified format - after cutting vegetables into small pieces.
In Greece, among other things, there is a proverb: having known a village salad, you will know Greece (or another wording: a village salad is all Greece in one plate). Enjoy the taste of fresh vegetables and soft cheese and get to know Greece!
