The Slavic east and the Balkans · Volume 30, The Living Culture, the Roman Vein and the Rose Valley
Shopska Salad
Bulgaria
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 20 minutes
- Researched
- No outside sources linked
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Bulgaria, and this chapter's clearest example of a manufactured "ancient" national dish, less than seventy years old.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 20 minutes.
Ingredients
- 4, about 500g tomato
- 1 large, about 250g cucumber
- 1 small onion
- 2 pepper, roasted and skinned
- 3 to 4 tbsp sunflower oil
- 1 to 2 tbsp vinegar
- 150g sirene, grated
Method
- Dice the tomato, cucumber and onion.
- Roast and skin the pepper, then dice.
- Dress with sunflower oil and vinegar.
- Finish with grated sirene over the top.
Notes
Invented in 1956 by Balkantourist chefs at the Chernomorets restaurant on the Black Sea coast, for the new international tourist trade, and first printed the same year in a state-era household manual without cheese at all; the cheese and roasted pepper only became fixed parts of the recipe in the early 1970s.
What a modern chef changes
A real char, a quick pickle and an emulsified dressing
About 40 minutes, including pickling
Method
- Peel and deseed the tomatoes properly rather than leaving watery seed pockets in the dice.
- Quick-pickle the onion for twenty minutes before assembly, cutting its raw bite without losing its crunch.
- Char the peppers directly over the Big Green Egg's open flame rather than under a grill pan, for real smoke rather than a grill mark.
- Freeze the sirene briefly and grate it on the coarse side of a box grater into a fine, even snow rather than crumbling it into clumps by hand.
- Finish with a proper sunflower-oil-and-vinegar emulsion rather than the two poured on separately.