Let's start with the incredible: Greece has everything except ... Greek salad! No, of course, in numerous restaurants aimed at receiving and entertaining foreign tourists, the staff learned well that when asked if they have the above-mentioned salad on their menu, they should answer in the affirmative and at the same time nod their heads energetically to hide their own attitude. to such a widespread myth. However, the truth is that what we call Greek salad in Greece itself (like in many other Mediterranean countries) is called by dozens of different names, among which there is not only the one to which we are accustomed.
The most common local "name" that a hero hasof 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, another name for Greek salad has come into use among the Greeks - 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 us allow ourselves to discount our own traditions and call the dish of fresh vegetables and cheese, which is commonly prepared in the Mediterranean countries, Greek salad, however, at the same time, in our mind we will certainly begin to keep a little notch in memory of how to properly call it.
So let's go through the basic ingredients of Greek salad? Specialthe value of this dish is due to the fact that it contains almost everything that a person needs: proteins, fats, carbohydrates. A serving of delicious salad, rich in taste and charming in its richness, and you 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, delicately cleanses the intestines, saturates the body with useful substances and microelements.
If you believe that Greek salad can be made from tasteless, odorless semi-plastic greenhouse tomatoes that lie in 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 aromatic tomatoes grown in the open field, better - farm or village ones. Ideally - tomatoes grown with your own hands in your own garden.
There are no restrictions on the variety of tomatoes. Depending on personal preference, you can choose fleshy red tomatoes, juicy pink, rich black, restrained yellow.
The rule regarding the way tomatoes are grown is equally true for cucumbers: the fruits should be fresh, firm, juicy and very aromatic. Flabby green sticks, which modern stores offer in abundance, are absolutely not suitable for Greek salad.
If a crazy thought runs through my head to peel the fruit from the skin, take a good old broom and chase it away. Not a single self-respecting Greek will deprive cucumbers of their important component!
Remember again that Greek salad is a rustic and simple dish, and pass by the perfect bell peppers that can be purchased at the supermarket. In the absence of access to personal gardening, the destination is a farmer's market, where grandmothers with string bags, strong grandfathers on bicycles, and brisk ruddy young ladies in colorful scarves come.
Choose firm fruits with a fresh stalk: if it has grafted, it signals that the pepper was picked several days, or even weeks ago. They can be used for stuffing or making sauces, but they are completely unsuitable as a component of Greek salad.
Do you want to make a Greek salad or a Greek-like salad? This moment is very important when it comes to cheese. The fact is that, according to a decision approved in 2007 in the EU, feta can only be called cheese of Greek origin, made from cow's or sheep's milk. Anything that you buy in stores with that name, but not 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 a real feta in supermarkets, but few people dare to spend a lot of money on what there are domestic analogues, no less worthy and high quality. Which cheese to buy to make a real Greek salad is, of course, up to you.
To make Greek salad, you will need 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 top quality pickled olives and olives. You need juicy, firm fruits of a beautiful chocolate color with a well-visible eggplant hue. The stuffed options are good and tasty, but totally unsuitable for making a real Greek salad.
Many famous chefs believe that high-quality olive oil is one third of the guarantee of success: it is this oil 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, but rather green - thick, rich and herbal. The taste of such oil is very characteristic - it is barely perceptibly bitter, stuns with a mixture of salty, sour and sweet, strikes with its richness, surprises with its subtlety.
People in the know say that in many ways the perfect taste of Greek salad depends on how you prepare the onion. Yes, just cook it - there are a lot of recipes for Greek salad on the Internet, but only some sources slightly open the veil and say that before adding onions to the salad, you should remove bitterness, stiffness and anger from it. The taste of this dish should make you love the world and be happy with people, so peel the onion, cut it into rings and put it in a marinade prepared in advance for a couple of minutes: a little hot water, salt, a spoonful of sugar. Taking out the onion from the marinade, in no case do we squeeze it out or deform it; it should remain intact and beautiful.
Oregano is the main Greek culinary herb and is added wherever possible - many Greek dishes have an oregano accent. You can, of course, season the salad with Italian basil, French rosemary, or Georgian cilantro, but it won't be quite a Greek salad, or even a 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.
Ingredients:
Preparation
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 a dressing with olive oil and lemon juice. You can add some white wine and balsamic vinegar. A drop of honey, soy sauce, narsharab, some grain mustard, orange peel will make the dressing even more original.
The main rule for preparing salad dressing is that the sauce should be very rich in taste, but pleasant. If you have prepared a dressing, but you do not like it (yes, you must try it first!), The salad will not fix it, rather, it will ruin the salad itself.
There are many options that allow you to diversify the usual village salad. Some recipes include lettuce. Lightly salted salmon and canned tuna, boiled cold pasta and baked bell peppers, ready-made lentils and raw cauliflower, capers and anchovies, avocados and mushrooms - everyone chooses additives to their taste and wallet.
By the way, another option is endive leaves. They are good not only for an additional flavoring note - they are very cool to serve salad in portions. It turns out to be unusual and stylish.
Greek salad is so popular all over the world that numerous experiments in serving it became a completely natural course of development of this dish.
Many chefs of famous restaurants build "turrets" of vegetables, alternating them with cheese. They are served in “boats” of bell pepper or lettuce, in pita bread and on toasted slices of bread, in small glasses like verrines and huge bowls, the contents of which can be fed to half of China.
Vegetables are laid out on a plate in bright multicolored rows, alternate in a salad bowl with appetizing layers, roughly cut into a couple of pieces, carefully 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 world come up with new and new interesting ways to treat their guests with a delicious dish made from fresh vegetables and tender soft cheese.
1. Ingredients for Greek village salad are cut into large pieces. No, not just large, but as large as possible - they must hide the maximum taste in themselves, plus it is impermissible to spend more than 5 minutes of time on preparing the most ordinary everyday dish.
2. Do you prepare salad for yourself and your family? Then put your doubts aside - and stir the contents of the bowl with your hands. Ru-ka-mi! This will not only add soulfulness to the salad, but will also allow you to keep the vegetables whole without crushing or even crushing them.
3. When adding olive oil, it is worth not only paying attention to its quality (only the best, only proven!), But also to the quantity. The canonical Greek salad should be oily, very oily - no real Greek woman will regret olive oil, because she knows that after the salad bowl is empty, a delicious "juice" from vegetables, cheese and dressing will remain at its bottom. The Greeks dip pieces 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 the sunny country even invented a separate word - "ladobukies" ("oil slices"), which means completely indecent, but incredibly savory soaking bread in a salad sauce.
4. Don't slice the cheese. Limit yourself to one large chunk that is laid out on top of the vegetables. It's prettier, tastier and more "Greek" this way.
5. Greek salad is prepared just before serving, and when served, immediately eaten. He does not need to insist, the products should be as fresh as possible and just chopped.
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 national love that they began to be used in salads.
However, history claims that it was only a prototype of the modern Greek salad - say, its distant genetic ancestor, nothing more. At the time when the first tomatoes and onions appeared in Greece, these vegetables were not cut into pieces, but eaten exclusively whole. Only almost a century later, with another wave of emigrants, one of the Greeks arrived in the United States, who guessed to cook his favorite dish in a slightly modified format - after cutting vegetables into small pieces.
In Greece, among other things, there is a proverb: having learned a village salad, you will know Greece (or another formulation: a village salad is all of Greece in one plate). Enjoy the taste of fresh vegetables and soft cheese and get to know Greece!
When we asked a question to our friends, who have been coming to Greece from different parts of the world on vacation for many years in a row, what attracts them to this country, they answered us with a smile: “Clean sea, gentle sun, always fresh seafood, delicious wine, Greek hospitality, and, of course, the most delicious Greek salad in the world ... "
Indeed, in the catalogs of the world's best restaurants, along with the most exquisite dishes, Greek salad occupies not the last place.
Greek salad, commonly referred to in its homeland as "horjatiki" - rustic, got its name due to the fact that its constituent components: onions, olives, sweet green peppers, as well as cucumbers, tomatoes and olive oil are those simple and familiar products, which the Greek peasants ate.
However, tomatoes, like the salad itself, appeared on the table of the Greeks relatively recently.
It is known that tomatoes were brought to Europe by the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century, and they came to Greece only in 1818 along with potatoes.
Wandering Catholic monks brought them to Greece. At first, tomatoes were grown as ornamental plants to decorate the monastery grounds - their fruits were considered poisonous. And only from 1825 they began to cultivate for consumption in almost all regions of the country.
At first, tomatoes were mistaken for exotic fruits. The Greeks ate tomatoes the way they used to eat fruits: biting off pieces from the whole fruit, eating them with bread and cheese.
However, vegetables, even such as onions, were not cut - they were also consumed whole. Fortunately, the pale purple onion was sweet and fragrant.
As a separate dish, salad appeared thanks to one curious incident.
In 1909, a Greek economic emigrant who worked for many years in America in a weaving factory went to his native village to attend his nephew's wedding.
In a foreign land, he was very homesick for his homeland, Greek olives, olive oil, unique cheese, ripe vegetables that were grown in his village.
On the way home, he had a toothache. At home, the damned tooth ached at all. My sister advised to rinse it with ouzo - aniseed vodka. The sharp pain gradually subsided.
It was supper time. My sister gathered on the table: bread, olives, cheese, some vegetables. But the tooth was still aching and did not give a bite of vegetables, as was customary.
Then a clever man found a way out - without thinking twice, he crumbled all the products into pieces in an earthen bowl, added a handful of olives to it, put a large piece of feta on top, poured it with rustic olive oil, and began to gobble it up with great pleasure.
My sister also tried the new food, and she really liked it. She decided to surprise the neighbors and serve it to the wedding table. The salad was appreciated!
Since then, rustic salad has become a favorite and staple of Greek cuisine.
If the tomato is the king of Greek salad, then Feta is the queen.
If you don't put feta cheese in the salad, then it will be a regular vegetable salad. It is Feta that gives the rustic salad a unique flavor, a kind of Greek charm.
Real feta is made only in Greece in a special way from a mixture of 70% sheep and 30% goat milk. Feta goes through a very complex and long process of manufacturing and subsequent processing, developed over the centuries.
Homer in his poem "The Odyssey" tells that the Cyclops Polyphemus was the first manufacturer of cheese, which, according to the descriptions of the ancient Greek poet, was very similar to Feta.
The specific aroma of Greek Feta is the aroma of herbs that feed sheep and goats grazing in the meadows of Macedonia, Thrace, Epirus, Thessaly, Central Greece, Peloponnese, and the islands of Lesbos and Crete.
And only in these, and in no other regions of Greece, this wonderful product is prepared.
Feta has a spicy taste that cannot be confused with any other - tart, slightly salty, with a slight hint of sourness.
It belongs to soft types of light cheeses. When cutting cheese into pieces, it should not crumble and leave no traces on the surface of the knife.
Feta contains no more than 43% fat and 56% moisture.
Feta's color should be white, like Pendelia marble.
For all these indisputable advantages, the cheese has been awarded the Feta brand, and no other white cheeses made outside Greece can be called that.
This is how she is, the Greek queen of Feta cheeses, and she takes a royal place in the Greek salad - at its very top!
Greek salad is popular not only in Greece itself, but also far beyond its borders.
A question from the famous catering company Grub Hub Seamless: "What dish do American clerks prefer for lunch?" over twenty-five thousand restaurants and fast food outlets across America answered: "Greek Salad".
And to the question: “Why do customers prefer Greek salad rather than the same classic green salad made from lettuce leaves?”, It was explained that Greek salad contains more complete proteins, fats and vitamins, contains more varied quality ingredients and amazing taste.
In Greece, there is no such tavern, restaurant, diner where horjatiki is not served.
It goes well with any meat, fish or seafood dishes served on the table.
It can also be a great independent snack for any wine or other stronger drink.
The calorie content of the salad in Greek and Russian sources is not the same: a portion of 200 grams for the Greeks is estimated at 415 kcal, while Russian cooks count only 320 kcal.
A 1-ounce serving of Classic Greek Feta Salad contains:
The Guinness record was set by the inhabitants of the town of Ierapetra, in Crete, by preparing the world's largest portion of Greek salad of seven tons of tomatoes, three tons of cucumbers, two tons of pepper and one ton of onions. The salad took 800 kg of feta and 500 liters of olive oil!
The uniqueness of the taste of this dish is determined not only by the composition and quality of the products included in it, but also by the set of ingredients used for dressing.
The basis of the sauce for the Greek salad is good quality olive oil, preferably cold pressed.
Other types of bases are rarely used in Greek cuisine, preferring to season all vegetable dishes with olive oil rather than mayonnaise or similar sauces.
First, because olive oil contains a unique flavor and aroma.
Secondly, whole treatises have been written about the benefits of olive oil, from the time of Hippocrates to the latest scientific research in the field of nutrition and medicine.
In Greek taverns, the classic village salad is seasoned with either a mixture of olive oil, lemon and herbs - oregano (oregano), in Greek - "rigani", and thyme - "fimari", sometimes parsley is also added.
Or, leaving the same base, add high-quality wine or balsamic vinegar. It all depends on the taste preferences of the cook preparing the salad.
It is advisable to make the dressing in advance so that it infuses and acquires the taste and aroma of spices.
So, for dressing for a real Greek salad, we need:
Mix together the oil, lemon juice and aromatic herbs, whisking all the ingredients with a culinary whisk.
We leave the dressing for infusion, and proceed to the preparation of the dish.
To cook khorjatiki, as it is prepared by the hostesses in Greece, we need to have the following products:
Now, attention! A step-by-step guide to the correct preparation:
The main secret is that all vegetables are cut into large pieces and stacked in layers.
Salad ready. Pepper, salt and stir before placing the salad on plates, just before eating.
Kali orexi! Enjoy your meal!
Greek salad, which came to us from the country of the same name, is a frequent guest on the table, be it festive or ordinary. The recipe for Greek salad at home is easy to prepare, you need to spend a maximum of 10 minutes on it. Delicious, cheap, and also very healthy appetizer - Greek salad with croutons. Delight your family with this treat, cook with us!
One of the recipes for this salad includes vegetables, creamy feta and dressing. The dish turns out to be light, but at the same time satisfying due to the cream cheese, which, together with the butter dressing, gives the main calorie content.
In fact, "Greek" salad can look rather simplistic, include very few products, but still remain tasty and rich. The most important thing is to know the required proportions and ingredients.
You can also try a cooking that doesn't take much of your time.
Avocado has a wonderful, buttery taste and delicate texture. Many people love to add this fruit to a salad, and in combination with cream cheese, the result is simply wonderful.
Greek salad without olives has a huge number of variations, each of which will definitely find its consumer. After all, the classic recipe for the dish is loved by many, and the varieties of snacks with original additives are sometimes so unusual that they can surprise anyone, even the most inveterate gourmet.
Making a classic Greek salad is not at all difficult and anyone can cook it, even the most novice culinary specialist, who has absolutely no culinary skills yet. This healthiest dish came to the world of tastes from the villagers of Greece, who simply took and mixed their vegetables, poured them with olive oil.
And now people around the world are enjoying the flavors of the Mediterranean and adding health to their diets by eating this great popular dish both in restaurants and at home.
And you don't even need to go to Greece to try this great dish! :)
How to make a Greek salad at home? Let's figure it out!
Greek salad with Fetaxa cheese is a real pantry of useful ingredients.
I must say that cheese with this name is a fairly common ingredient in the Greek cuisine. In any cafe or restaurant menu, we can see a salad with a fetax.
Today we are going to study a simple classic recipe for buckwheat salad with fetax cheese.
Perhaps the most important thing in preparing this dish is the availability of high-quality and freshest products. In addition, a coarse cutting of all the constituent ingredients is an invariable rule.
Tomatoes - for a real tasty Greek salad, large and juicy fruits are needed, in which there is not too much pulp, because if the tomato is too runny, its juice can dilute the dressing and add wateriness. The best consistency for Greek salad is the so-called "fleshy" tomatoes - they are the sweetest, and for this classic recipe the sweetish note of tomato is a great addition.
Cucumbers it is better to choose rather large ones, but with small seeds. For this purpose, salad cucumbers are best suited - they are easy to cut to length.
In Greece, cucumbers are usually peeled - then the texture of the salad changes slightly, in this version it feels different, and the cucumbers do not stand out so much against the background of other, softer ingredients
Onion it is best to take red or white onions, just not onions - you should not add it, this taste is not at all for Greek salad! I must say that Choriatica salad, as Wikipedia says, is another name for Greek salad, it is completely edible without onions. 
Lettuce leaves can be absolutely any, but I dare to recommend you the Romano salad, which is easy to find in supermarkets. This variety has a very interesting nutty flavor that will add an unrivaled note and bulk to the overall recipe range.
It is better not to cut the leaves, pick them with your hands and leave the stem part for other recipes so that the greens do not oxidize and give up their useful properties completely
Cheese.Feta, Fetaksa, feta cheese, which one to choose? The description and choice of cheese for this dish deserves a separate article. If you don’t know the name and don’t understand the varieties and tastes of this cheese, you should not invent something extraordinary, take elementary fetaki. This variety is ideal for the degree of saltiness, so your Greek salad does not need additional salt.
If you are following a vegan weight loss diet, use tofu as a substitute
Olives - and here you don't have to invent anything, take a can of peeled olives without any additives.
Pepper you can add it or not, since good tomatoes will give you the sweetness you need, and if you really want - take Bulgarian ... Hmm ... it turns out interestingly - Greek salad with bell pepper :) International, however! :)
Olive oil - better than the “Extra virgin olive oil” brand, and the first cold pressing.
How to make a Greek salad? The preparation itself will take you literally a few minutes. You just need:
Do not use dicing so that your salad does not change its texture to mushy. In Greece, coarse cuts are usually used
For a classic dressing recipe, squeeze a little lemon juice into a bowl. Then pour in twice as much olive oil and sprinkle with dried, or even better fresh oregano.
A variety of spices can be used for dressing, depending on your taste. An interesting combination gives the following composition:
It is the combination of these components that will give the optimal taste. Since basil and oregano go well with tomatoes, rosemary will add aroma. Naturally, it will be tastier if you add fresh herbs to the salad, which you just need to finely chop for dressing, but if you don't have them, then dried spices are quite a normal option. Ground white or black pepper will also be a great addition to the dressing, they will help to reveal the taste.
The next kind of Choriatica can also be attributed to the classics. This recipe uses feta cheese - a very useful type of cheese, a storehouse of calcium for any organism. During the cooking process, all the vitamins and nutrients that it is rich in are preserved in the cheese.
1. First, all the ingredients must be cut: cucumber in halves, slices of tomatoes, onion in half rings, pepper strips, cheese into cubes, remove olives from the jar.
2. Now let's prepare the dressing by mixing all the ingredients.
3. Then mix all the products except the feta cheese and season with the dressing. And only after that, carefully put the chopped cheese cubes on top
Your delicious salad is ready! Enjoy!
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This variation uses Chinese cabbage instead of green salad leaves.
Cut the Chinese cabbage into thin strips about 0.5 cm thick.
Wash and dry the cucumbers, then cut them into halves.
Cut the tomatoes into small slices.
Peel the seeds and chop the bell peppers into strips.
We remove seeds from olives, if there are any, or use ready-made, pitted.
Cut the onion into rings, or half rings.
Chop the feta cheese into cubes.
Collect all the ingredients in one bowl, add salt, if the cheese is not salty enough, pepper, pour over with olive oil and sprinkle with lemon juice.
Mix everything - done! Enjoy your meal!
For an original crunchy taste, croutons are added to Greek salad. Let's take a closer look at this recipe for making Greek salad with chicken and crackers.
What do we need in this case?
First you need to boil the chicken breast until tender, (no more than 10 - 15 minutes), then cool and cut it into cubes.
Or you can do it differently - first cut the raw breast into cubes and fry it in vegetable oil, then the salad will turn out to be more satisfying.
Now take a loaf of white bread, cut off 4 - 5 even pieces, 1 cm thick, remove the crust from them and cut into even cubes, dry them in the oven or fry them in a pan in vegetable oil.
You can start assembling the salad - after all, nothing else needs to be heat treated.
Put the lettuce leaves (thoroughly washed and dried beforehand) whole on a plate, it is better to cook the dish in portions, do not make it in large portions and for future use.
We cut the cucumbers and put them on top of the tomato, there are no specific regulations, in grams or pieces - how much of what is needed in the salad, what you like best, and put in more.
Peel the sweet bell pepper from the stalk, seeds and also cut into cubes and put to the already chopped ingredients.
We add some salt to all the vegetables, but you don't need to stir the salad
Put the chicken and olives on top, black olives and pitted olives are best for this.
The next component is feta cheese, but you can also use ordinary feta cheese. We also cut it into cubes and put it on the salad.
Put bread crumbs on top and sprinkle everything with olive oil.
Now sprinkle with dry Provencal herbs, you can use origano.
That's it, our delicious Greek salad with chicken and croutons is ready. I dare to hope that in this version you may like it even more than the classic Greek salad.
And the last recipe in today's article:
Vitamin, summer and light Greek salad, which is hard to resist ... .. It is so tempting and appetizing!
I hope you enjoyed the classic Greek salad recipes presented today, which you can easily prepare at home and eat like in a restaurant!
Moreover, you can learn how to serve it to the table very beautifully, as, for example, in this video:
Bon appetit and see you next time!
Ingenious is simple! These are the words that can be used to describe the classic Greek salad.
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 flavorful seasonal vegetables that are used to make salad and in perfectly matched ingredients and proportions. Vegetables for Greek salad are cut into rather 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 site. And believe me, your Greek salad will taste better than in a restaurant!
Let's start cooking!
And confess, are there many Greek salad lovers among you and how often do you prepare 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 cooking 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 the Shopska salad is baked, and thanks to this, the salad is obtained with a very interesting taste.
| tomato | 3 pcs |
|---|---|
| cucumbers (small) | 2-3 pcs |
| red sweet salad onions (can be replaced with onions) | 0.5-1 pcs |
| bell pepper (green or yellow) | 1 PC |
| olives (b / c) | 2-3 tbsp |
| feta cheese or feta | 100-150 g |
| olive oil | 2 tbsp |
| red wine vinegar (can be substituted with lemon juice) | 2 tbsp |
| oregano (dried) | |
| salt | |
| freshly ground pepper |
