Radish and beans salad

Radish and beans salad
Radish and beans salad

Or, another of Ottolenghi’s salads! (although I diverged from the recipe in his book).

Ingredients (for “4 people”)

  • 500 g broad beans, deshelled (frozen is OK)
  • 350 g radishes
  • 1/2 onion finely sliced
  • 2 tbsp chopped coriander
  • 2 tbsp chopped flat-leaf parsley
  • 30 g preserved lemons, chopped
  • juice of 2 lemons
  • 3 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp ground cumin
  • tahini sauce
  • pita breads
  • salt
  • pepper

Preparation

  1. To cook the beans place them on boiling water for 1-2 minutes if fresh, or longer if they are frozen. We want them to still be ‘firm’, so pinch a few rather than just guide yourself by the clock. Then drain them and put them in cold water. The recipe calls for de-shelling each bean by squeezing each with the fingertips, but I just couldn’t be bothered. More fibre!
  2. Cut the radishes in quarters or sixths (depending on their size and your willingness to chop). I also chopped their ends because I don’t like odd looking roots and leaves in my salads, but if you found pretty radishes maybe it’s worth keeping the leaves!
  3. Then mix all the ingredients together in a bowl—except for the oil or tahini sauce.
  4. Serve in individual bowls or dishes, and add the olive oil and tahini sauce to each, to taste. Possibly with a warm pita bread drizzled with oil… yummy!

The reason for not adding the oil or tahini to the whole mix is that I wanted to keep some salad for next day, and if you add oil it makes the salad all mushy, which I’m not a big fan of. Also, my partner doesn’t like tahini, so all the more reason to customise my serving with a generous amount of tahini while the “spousal bowl” had only olive oil added ?

It keeps really well for the next day. And it’s vegan!

Some thoughts

This was quite an interesting salad, although perhaps a touch too munchy—I had this feeling that I was munching non stop, for too long. It could be solved by having less of the salad and adding some other stuff to make it a bit more varied and more of a mains rather than just a very big salad.

The onion can be a bit too strong. And that’s even if I kept it on water for a long time to make it milder. I think next time it’d be wise to reduce the amount of onion.

Likewise, there seemed to be too much lemon juice. I think next time I’ll just juice one lemon.

This was the first time I used tahini and preserved lemons myself. I have probably eaten them before, but the way they’re used makes it hard to pinpoint them if you’re not familiar with them beforehand. I think I need to experiment more with these ingredients, but they pleased me (I’m not too surprised on the tahini, as I’m a big fan of cumin seeds!).

I also imagine this could work with other types of beans. I wonder about dried beans too. Mmm! New things to try.

Also, for some reason this salad felt like a lot of work. Maybe I was just tired.

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