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Thursday, 27 June 2013

Recipe: Finnish salad with orange blossom dressing


I'm a bit in love with this salad...the combination tastes like summer...i might start eating it daily to bring out the sun!

 It needs to be served up quickly, otherwise the watermelon will give over its liquid to the bottom of the salad bowl and dilute the sunny dressing that goes with the salad.

Serves 5-6
½ medium watermelon
½ cucumber, sliced into circles

750g broad beans, unshelled and blanched
200g feta cheese 

For the dressing
1 tbsp orange blossom water
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
3 tbsp olive oil
Salt and black pepper 

1 Cut the watermelon in half and chop the flesh into cubes. I never bother extracting the seeds, finding their gentle crunch a welcome contrast to the sweet yielding flesh.
2 Arrange the cubes in a shallow platter or bowl. Scatter over the sliced cucumber and broad beans, sprinkling lightly, and crumble the feta over the salad (barrel-aged feta crumbles well). All of this needs to be done with a sense of urgency, since any ripe melon starts losing its juice with the first cut.
3 Mix the dressing ingredients together in a small jug and spoon gently over the salad. A direct hit of salt and pepper on the melon works well, but also acts as a catalyst for drawing out more water from the melon, so go easy on the seasoning.

From Miranda Gardiner's A midsummer Finnish feast in The Guardian.

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