Like all iconic dishes, Nicoise salad knows its options. But to find the original recipe, we turned to Julia Sedefjian, a celebrity chef from Nice in Paris, who shared her secrets with us. Yield rice, potatoes or green beans.
You can store your potatoes, green beans, and your portion of rice. Because no, these three ingredients have no place in a Nicoise salad, a real, original one. In search of an authentic recipe for this summer dish from our regions, BFMTV.com met with Yulia Sedefjyan, who showed us the recipe for a real Nicoise salad.
The one who posed for her Baieta restaurant in Paris in 2006 at the age of 21 (the youngest celebrity chef in France!), reveals to us what she considers primarily a salad of raw vegetables and fishermen.
Raw salad with garden vegetables
Nicoise salad is a recipe that originates in the gardens of the inhabitants of Nice and the Mediterranean. Therefore, on the menu: tomatoes, olive oil, anchovies. It then evolved over time with the addition of beans, green onions, peppers and lettuce.
But today there are as many salad recipes from Nice as there are families in Nice, the chef admits. “This recipe has been slightly modified, but the salad consists of raw vegetables, olive oil, a little love and basta mow“.
tomato and onion salad
There are two commands in the Nicoise salad: “There are allowed products, those that can be added, but which are not allowed to everyone.” And in Nice there is a fierce fight between those who put in radishes and those who put in cucumbers, but at least everyone agrees to put in tomatoes, local onions, olives and “olive oil”.
And then for the fish you can put tuna in it, but in fact there are two schools, Yulia Sedefjyan emphasizes: “there is an “anchovies only” team or an “anchovies and tuna” team. But once again, as the woman from Nice points out, “it’s important to stay raw salad based with what we have in the garden and respect Nice’s cultural heritage.”
Star Cuisine with Tradition at the Center
In her restaurant Baieta, Yulia Sedefdjian revisits the traditional dishes of the heritage of Nice. On its menu we find small stuffed vegetables, pissaladière, bouillabaisse. But betraying the main recipe is out of the question: “I try to respect the products and cooking methods as much as possible … I will try to bring a little touch of modernity, but we want to rediscover the taste and we want to know what we eat »
To reproduce the recipe you will need:
- Green onion / rustic onion
- Basil
- anchovies
- Olives
- stalk of celery
- Radish
- purple artichokes
- beans
- heirloom tomatoes
- mesklun
- eggs
- Pepper
- Salt
- Olive oil