Like all iconic dishes, the niçoise salad knows its adaptations. But to find the original recipe, we called on Julia Sedefdjian, starred chef from Nice, in Paris, who shared her secrets with us. Exit rice, potato or green beans.
You can store your potatoes, green beans, and your portion of rice. Because no, these three ingredients have no place in the Niçoise salad, the real, the original. In search of an authentic recipe for this summer dish from our regions, BFMTV.com went to meet Julia Sedefdjian who showed us the recipe for the real Niçoise salad.
The one who was starred for her restaurant “Baieta” in Paris in 2006 from the age of 21 (the youngest starred chef in France!), reveals to us what she considers above all to be a salad of raw vegetables and fishermen.
A raw salad with garden vegetables
Salade niçoise is a recipe that finds its origins in the kitchen garden of the people of Nice and the Mediterranean Sea. On the menu, therefore: tomatoes, olive oil, anchovies. Then it evolved over time with the addition of fava beans, spring onions, peppers and lettuce.
But today there are as many salad recipes from Nice as there are families in Nice, recognizes the chef. “It’s a recipe that’s been a bit roughed up, but the salad is raw vegetables, olive oil, a little love and basta cosi”.
tomato onion salad
In the Niçoise salad, there are a bit of two teams: “There are authorized foods, those that can be added, but which are not validated by everyone”. And in Nice the fight is fierce between those who put in radishes, then those who will put in cucumbers, but at least everyone agrees to put in tomatoes, local onions, olives, and ‘olive oil.
And then for the fish it is possible to put tuna in it, but there are really two schools, underlines Julia Sedefdjian: “there is the ‘anchovy only’ team or the ‘anchovy and tuna’ team”. But once again, as the Nice woman points out, “The important thing is to stay on a raw salad base with what we have in the vegetable garden and to respect the cultural heritage of Nice”
A starred cuisine that puts tradition at the center
In her Baieta restaurant, Julia Sedefdjian revisits the traditional dishes of Nice’s heritage. On his menu, we find small stuffed vegetables, pissaladière, bouillabaisse. But it’s out of the question to betray the basic recipe, “I try to respect the products and the cooking methods as much as possible…I’m going to try to have small touches of modernity, but we want to rediscover the taste and we want to know what what we eat”
To reproduce the recipe you will need:
- Spring onions / country onions
- Basil
- anchovies
- Olives
- celery stalk
- Radishes
- purple artichokes
- fava beans
- heirloom tomatoes
- mesclun
- Eggs
- Pepper
- Salt
- Olive oil
