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Adam Liaw’s extra-nice salad nicoise (plus the secret to perfectly tender boiled potatoes)

France’s best-known salad is substantial enough for a main dish but light enough for hot summer days.

Adam Liaw
Adam Liaw

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France’s most famous salad, salad nicoise.
France’s most famous salad, salad nicoise.William Meppem

Nice’s most famous salad might well be France’s most famous salad as well, and like any famous food, there is no shortage of opinions on how to make it. Anchovies or tuna? Beans and potatoes? Mixed or composed?

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Ingredients

  • 2 free-range eggs

  • 2 ripe heirloom tomatoes, cut into large wedges

  • salt and black pepper, to season

  • a handful of green beans

  • 6 new potatoes

  • ½ a yellow capsicum, very thinly sliced

  • ½ small red onion, very thinly sliced

  • 1 Lebanese cucumber, peeled at intervals and quartered lengthways

  • 1 small carrot, grated on the small round holes of a box grater

  • 185g tuna chunks in olive oil, broken into large pieces

  • ½ cup pitted black olives

Vinaigrette

  • 1 tsp Dijon mustard

  • 1 garlic clove, finely grated

  • 2 tbsp white wine vinegar

  • juice of ½ a lemon

  • 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Method

  1. Step 1

    Boil the eggs by pricking a hole in the base and placing them in a large pot of boiling water for 8 minutes. Refresh in iced water, then peel.

  2. Step 2

    Season the tomatoes well with salt and set aside at room temperature.

  3. Step 3

    For the vinaigrette, combine the mustard, garlic, vinegar and lemon juice in a large bowl and slowly whisk in the oil.

  4. Step 4

    Place the potatoes in a pot of cold water and bring to a simmer. Simmer the potatoes for about 10 minutes until they are tender (a small sharp knife inserted into the potato should go in and come out easily). Remove from the pot and season with salt.

  5. Step 5

    Blanch the beans for about 30 seconds then drain, season with salt, and set aside. You don’t need to shock them in iced water (see notes).

  6. Step 6

    Cut the eggs in half lengthways and serve 2 halves per serve. Cut the potatoes into 1cm-thick slices (they should still be warm). Arrange all the ingredients in piles on a serving plate. Dress with the vinaigrette.

Notes

Beans and potatoes?

Authenticity is a tedious concept for a food writer. Dishes are in constant four-dimensional motion, changing ingredients and processes all the time, so if you want to make a particular version of a dish – in this case, a salad – from a particular place and a moment in time and call it “authentic”, that’s fine, but you need to know that there’s no single “authentic” version of any dish.

If I ordered a salad nicoise and received something without beans and potatoes, I don’t think it would cut it.

Jacques Medecin, who, aside from being the former mayor of Nice, also published the definitive book on Nicoise cuisine, wrote that the salad should be mainly tomatoes, the dressing should just be olive oil (not a vinaigrette), and that the only cooked ingredients are the boiled eggs. That said, Medicin was also a famously enthusiastic supporter of South African apartheid and was imprisoned for corruption. He died in disgrace after fleeing to Uruguay, so maybe we can take his views with a grain of salt.

French chef Auguste Escoffier.
French chef Auguste Escoffier.

On the other hand, the godfather of modern French cuisine, Auguste Escoffier, included the now-ubiquitous cooked potatoes and beans in his version. (By the by, Escoffier was also fired by London’s Savoy Hotel for massive fraud, but he was never actually imprisoned for it.)

Without writing a thesis on nicoise salads throughout history, if I ordered a salad nicoise and received something without the beans and potatoes we all now expect, I don’t think it would cut it. I use crisp blanched beans and tender potatoes in my nicoise and suggest that you do, too.

Cold water potatoes

Potatoes are high in starch and when starch granules are heated in the presence of water (such as by boiling), they swell. As the potatoes cook from the outside in, these swollen starch granules insulate the potato, making it hard for heat to penetrate to the centre. For this reason, it’s always best to start potatoes in cold water so that it cooks more evenly before the external starch begins to swell.

That said, new potatoes are lower in starch than the grown-up version, and cooking them in their skins helps to reduce water absorption. But regardless, starting potatoes in cold water is a good habit to get into.

Start boiling potatoes in cold water to ensure they cook more evenly.
Start boiling potatoes in cold water to ensure they cook more evenly.iStock

Blanching

This is going to sound like heresy, but I am not a blancher. That is to say, I don’t “shock” vegetables in cold or iced water after I’ve boiled them.

The idea behind shocking something in cold water is that it stops the cooking process so that the vegetables don’t overcook. I’ve never seen the point. I just take the vegetables out of the water before they’re completely cooked and let them steam themselves to complete the cooking.

It doesn’t matter too much with beans, but for things like broccoli that can hold a lot of water between the floret buds, taking them from hot, seasoned water and plunging them into cold, unseasoned water makes them taste watery (and makes them cold, which is not usually what we’re after anyway). I mean, you don’t shock a steak in cold water after grilling it, do you?

If you still feel you have to shock your vegetables, at least season the cold water you’re using to shock them.

Mixed or composed

A “composed” salad is one where the ingredients are arranged on a plate, so that the person eating can graze across the selection of ingredients and pick each mouthful. This has the advantage of making a meal a little more interesting, as each mouthful can be different.

A mixed salad is fairly straightforward, and its advantage is that by tossing the salad, you get more complete coverage with the dressing. The French way is to make the dressing in the base of your salad bowl and then add your leaves on top before tossing, which saves on washing up.

Some like to mix nicoise salads, but I think a composed salad, with each ingredient presented separately, is a much better way to do it.

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Adam LiawAdam Liaw is a cookbook author and food writer, co-host of Good Food Kitchen and former MasterChef winner.

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Original URL: https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/goodfood/recipes/adam-liaw-s-extra-nice-salad-nicoise-plus-the-secret-to-perfectly-tender-boiled-potatoes-20240123-p5ezda.html