The Best and Truly Authentic Greek Salad!

I had every intention of a huge post about our trip to Greece this week but truth be told trying to capture the trip in words has been more challenging and vast than I anticipated. There is just so much to share and I want to make sure I do it all justice and am not just boring you all with the slideshow of our vacation pictures :P.

So instead I’m going to share with you one of my top culinary obsessions (be assured there are many) from the trip! I literally “cant stop, won’t stop” making this and I am pretty sure that I’m going to keep making it as long as the weather in sunny Southern California reminds me of sun soaked days spent sailing from island to island. (sighs wistfully) Yup you guessed it (or at least read the title of this post) it is a truly authentic Greek salad!

What is a Greek salad you ask? Well up until this trip I sort of thought it was the Greek pasta salad I had grown up eating, but oh contraire mon amie. The Greek salad is a celebration of simple beautiful ingredients that combined sing a song for the ages! The ingredient list is roughly as follows:

• Tomatoes: Fresh from the garden, probably heirloom because it’s Greece and in Greece is there any other kind? In trying to recreate this at home the closest I have come is with heirloom tomato’s from our weekly farmers market. Rest assured I will be planting tomato’s in the garden as soon as the summer heat relaxes a bit.
• Cucumber: Light, crunchy, refreshing and hydrating, fresh picked from the garden would be great, but I think English and Persian cucumbers are also wonderful.
• Red/Purple onion: Yes I know they are “red onions”, do i call them “red onions” NO. They are purple gosh darn it! These were always slivered or sliced but never diced!
• Feta Cheese: This was served as a large beautiful block of cheese crowing the gorgeous fresh salad. You can totally use the block feta from the grocery store, but if you have access to a cheese counter or farmers market see if you can find some really fresh Feta, it is totally worth the effort! We sort of just broke it up to serve and eat.
• Kalamata Olives: These were fresh and always had the pits in.
• Oregano: Mostly everyone used dried oregano, but I did as our Chef about it and he said he would use fresh if he had it but the dried is just easier.
• Olive oil: You better believe that the Greeks take full ownership for the orgin of olive oil, ( sorry Italy). Our crew engineer claimed that almost all of the Italian olive oil that is sold actually comes from Greek olive groves. Take that as you will, here is what google has to say about it: “Greece is the fourth largest olive producer in the world, after Spain, Italy, and Turkey, and its olives are considered to be of high quality. However, Italy exports more olive oil than it uses, and sometimes Italian olive oil sold abroad is a mixture of Italian and other oils.”
• Salt and Pepper: stands to reason that a nation with so many islands has a abundance of sea salt, straight out of the Aegean! Also, fresh cracked pepper is best.

Optional additional ingredients:

• Red bell pepper
• Green Bell pepper
• Capers
• Lemon Juice

We ordered this at several restaurants, and several versions were made for us on the boat, no matter where it came from it was nearly always the same.

A note on preparation: This salad feels so luxurious in it’s simplicity, it is easy to throw together and feels somehow abundant. A small group from our party attended a Greek cooking class with actual Greek grandmothers and they watched as the salad was cut up by hand into the bowl (no cutting board) with ingredients picked out of the garden, olive oil and olives from a local orchard, Feta from local goats, everything cut up quickly not perfectly even, but with the deftness and flow that comes from years of repetition. I think cooking this way is a bit like a dance, it reminds me of watching my grandma roll out yeast rolls, they always come our perfect even in their imperfection.

And that is really it.

It is a simple dish and so easy to throw together, which may be part of its appeal as we have been thrust back into reality. Have it alone for lunch or as an appetizer or side dish with dinner! This simple dish is an ode to the beauty that comes with simplicity, which feels like a lesson from the ancients on how to “be”.

I hope you enjoy this and find as much joy in preparing it as you do eating it! I certainly will!