tomato and yogurt salad, or, the salad-hater's exception

[kindkit]

I'm not a fan of salads. It's partly that I don't care for most raw vegetables and fruits, partly that salads call to mind (a) the 16 years when I was a vegetarian and people all too often brushed off this (admittedly inconvenient) fact with "oh, well, never mind, you can have a salad," and (b) a deeply unpleasant set of associations with weight-loss diets. (And point b is not an issue I am prepared to discuss further. Do not tell me about your weight-loss program. Do not proselytize about low-calorie foods, raw foods, your views on health, etc. etc. etc. I wish this didn't need saying, but it always does.)

Anyway, I've finally found a salad I really love. I make variations of this a lot and I always enjoy it. The recipe, if you can call it that, which I give below is my own adaptation of a basic recipe from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Cooking and some more elaborate salad recipes from Chandra Padmanabhan's Dakshin: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India.



Simplest version:

1 medium to large tomato
Plain unsweetened yogurt
1 tablespoon oil (canola is fine, but mustard oil, available from Indian groceries, is delicious in my opinion)
About 1 teaspoon black (not yellow or brown) mustard seeds
Salt to taste

Cut the tomato into a smallish dice and stick it in a bowl.

Heat the oil in a small saucepan for which you have a lid, or something you can use as a lid. Add the mustard seeds, put the lid on the pan, and keep the pan on the heat as the mustard seeds start to pop like popcorn. When the popping slows down/stops, pour the mustard seeds and oil over the tomato. Add as much yogurt as you want. (I tend to use thick Greek-style yogurt and use just enough to bind the salad together, but Indian recipes often seem to use quite large amounts of yogurt. The salad will be thinner if you use regular yogurt rather than Greek-style.) Add salt if you like, although I think the salad is perfectly good without any.

The simplest version is delicious as is, but lots of variations and elaborations are possible.

Possible additions/changes to the vegetables; ones I especially recommend are in bold:

Cherry tomatoes (a mix of red and yellow are nice) instead of large tomatoes
Cucumber, peeled, seeded, and diced about the same size as the tomato pieces.
Chopped red onion or sliced green onions aka spring onions aka scallions (green onions are nice; raw red onions are too strong for me)
Cilantro aka fresh coriander, finely chopped

Possible additions to the spice mixture:

Chile (chopped if you want lots of heat, split lengthwise to but not through the stem end if you want less heat)
5 or so curry leaves
A pinch of whole cumin seeds (I'd use cumin or curry leaves but perhaps not both)
1/2 teaspoon or so dry urad dal (split black gram beans)

If you add any of these spices and flavorings, the procedure is to add them to the hot oil in the pan after the mustard seeds have stopped popping, and stir them around for 30 seconds or so before adding to the tomato mixture. If you use the urad dal, you want to make sure it browns nicely in the oil, or it will be too firm to eat (browning makes it edibly crunchy, though if you need to be very cautious about your teeth you might want to omit the dal).

Be sure to adjust the amount of spices according to the amount of vegetables you're using.

This salad will keep for a a couple of days, covered, in the fridge. If you used split chiles, be aware that the salad will get hotter if you leave the chiles in. Oh, and pick out the curry leaves while/before you eat; they won't hurt you but a whole curry leaf is pretty strong.

This salad is good as an accompaniment to other dishes (especially south Indian dishes), or as a lunch along with toasted papadams and some chutneys and/or pickles. Incidentally, and contrary to the advice I've seen in Indian cookbooks and cooking blogs, it is perfectly possible to toast papadams over an electric burner. Just hold the papadam an inch or two above the burner with two pairs of tongs, one in each hand, and move and turn it over the burner until it's crisp and bubbles form. I like them better dry-toasted this way than fried.

Comments

[st_aurafina]

Cherry tomatoes and cucumber? We are drowning in both right now, so this is a perfect recipe. (If only I could work zucchini in there somehow, we'd be set.)

[kindkit]

I haven't tried it with zucchini, but I don't see why you couldn't work it in. Fresh out of your garden it should be very tasty when raw, or you could lightly steam or saute it. Yogurt + mustard seeds + curry leaves make the basis for a number of vegetable salads. Dakshin has one where sliced okra is cooked in the spiced oil and then cooled before the yogurt is added.

If you have an abundance of green beans too, you can make a similar warm salad without yogurt: boil or steam the beans, add chopped tomato, some cilantro, and oil in which you've popped some mustard seeds and then added cumin seeds.

ETA: You could also do chopped cucumber in yogurt. Rather than mustard seeds, I'd dry-toast some cumin seeds and either leave them whole or grind them.

[st_aurafina]

Oh, yeah, I think I will go with the cucumber and yoghurt - I love tzatziki, and cumin seeds would be really interesting.

I wish we had an abundance of green beans! It's been very weird to see what thrived and what didn't - no beans, lots of peas. No eggplant, lots of zucchini.

[lilacsigil]

I have the same associations with salad, so it's always great to find a recipe for something that's not Punishment Salad! st_aurafina made an awesome roast beet salad over Christmas, but we're in the middle of a heatwave now and it's too hot to have the oven on, so this sounds great.

[kindkit]

The phrase "Punishment Salad" is an excellent example of "it's funny because it's true."

Now that I think about it, I do enjoy subverting the trope and finding non-punitive salads. Here's another one I like that's good for hot weather: slice a cucumber very thinly (peel it first if necessary), put it in a colander, add a teaspoon or so of salt, mix, and let sit for half an hour or so. Rinse thoroughly and then squeeze the cucumber slices in cheeseclock or paper towels to get out as much water as you can. Seriously squeeze--rather than turning the slices to mush, this process makes them crisper. Add some wakame seaweed that's soaked in cold water until tender, and dress with soy sauce, a little rice vinegar, and mirin (preferably) or sugar.

Okay, one more, which does require the oven but only briefly. Take some ripe figs, slice them down from the stem end almost to the bottom twice, in a cross pattern, so that they're almost quartered. Put a bit of gorgonzola dolce or other not-too-pungent blue cheese in the middle, add a toasted walnut half, and bake just until the cheese is oozy. Place the figs on a bed of arugula that's been dressed with walnut oil or olive oil and lemon juice and sprinkle a few more toasted walnuts over the top.

[amalnahurriyeh]

I am not a raw tomato person, but I like the mustard seed and yogurt dressing idea. I should give that a shot...

[kindkit]

My south Indian cookbook suggests that unripe mango can be dressed mustard seeds and yogurt. I haven't tried it but it could be yummy. Or there's another similar salad that uses lightly cooked okra as the vegetable. So I think it's pretty flexible.

[vilakins]

Interesting! I never thought of yogurt and tomatoes together. Me, I only eat salads that I enjoy and I loathe all those stalky meclun and rocket ones restaurants seem to serve now. C'mon, how about some variety, chefs? Salads can be delicious and inventive, like the ones at the Middle Eastern Cafe, my favourite place when I was at uni, and still every b it as good.

[kindkit]

Yeah, I think generally the problem with salads is greens. I love cooked greens, and there are some greens I do like raw (such as arugula/rocket, oddly enough), but generally I don't like a big pile of raw green too-crunchy lettuce or whatever.

[vilakins]

No, there has to be something interesting and tasty in there as well.

[tree_and_leaf]

Sounds delicious. It's hard to get decent tomatoes at the moment, but I shall keep t in mind for the summer.

[kindkit]

I've been making the salad with winter tomatoes, actually. I'm sure it's even better with good summer tomatoes, but it's also a nice way to compensate for the shortcomings of the winter ones. I wouldn't try it with, say, supermarket Romas, but those "tomatoes on the vine" aren't too terrible and cherry tomatoes are pretty decent even in winter.