Slata Tounsia
Tomato, cucumber, pepper and onion cut very small and dressed with olive oil and lemon. The Tunisian cut is finer than anywhere else in the region — almost a mince.
Photograph credit: Tunisian Salad (image of Salade tunisienne on Wikidata Q3469476) by Emna Mizouni · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · this resized copy is shared under the same licence
Slata Tounsia: Step by Step
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Deseed the tomatoes completely and discard the watery centres.
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Cut the tomato, cucumber, pepper and onion into a fine 5 mm dice. Take your time — this is the recipe.
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Rinse the diced onion briefly under cold water and shake it dry.
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Whisk the oil, lemon, dried mint and pepper together, leaving the salt aside.
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Combine the vegetables and parsley in a bowl and pour over the dressing.
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Add the salt and turn everything over once.
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Serve within a few minutes, with bread and a spoon rather than a fork.
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Things to Watch For
- Five millimetres. Larger and it becomes a different salad.
- Deseed everything or it floods.
- Salt last, serve immediately.
Ingredient Swaps
- Fresh herbs work in place of the dried mint at roughly three times the quantity — a teaspoon of dried is about a tablespoon of fresh, chopped.
The Short Version
The dice is smaller than any other salad in this book — five millimetres, not fifteen — and that is not fussiness. At this size the vegetables stop behaving like separate things on a fork and become a single dressed mass you eat with bread, which is how it is served. It also means the salad must be assembled immediately before eating: cut this fine, tomato gives up its water within about ten minutes.
To Go With It
Grilled fish · Mlawi · Harissa on the side
Leftovers
Does not keep. Cut the vegetables up to 2 hours ahead and dress at the table.
What's in a Serving
Per serving, calculated from the ingredient list with USDA FoodData Central figures (SR Legacy). A calculation, not a laboratory analysis: brands, cuts and how you measure change the real numbers. How the figures are worked out.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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