Georgian salads

[Jubal]

Georgian salads

I made one recently, as shown. Kind of, anyway. arguable if I did a good job, but I thought it was nice. I put it together for my department's Now Ruz (that is, Persian new year) celebration, figuring I'd add something from my kinda-neighbouring-to-Persian area of study.

A Georgian salad is interesting - comparable in some ways to a Greek salad in that the base is chopped cucumber (usually quite chunky rather than fine-cut), with no leaf vegetables as a norm. Tomatoes and onion are also very common elements - I used red onion in this one - but perhaps the most quintessential 'Georgian' element is walnut. Here I added this by scattering a slightly massively too generous portion of chopped walnut on as a topping, which I've seen done before: equally, though, walnut oil is a traditional element and is the core way Georgian salads are dressed.

I'm not sure what the Georgian obsession with walnut is but it goes well beyond salads, they're also used to make the paste for badrijani (aubergine rolls), in desserts as the base for churchkela grape-and-walnut sticks and as a garnish for pelamushi grape-cakes, and probably in a load more stuff I'm forgetting right now. The pric

Anyway, there's one final element in the right-hand dish, which is the brown caper-like things around the outside. These aren't capers at all - they're pickled flowerbuds. the tree and dish are both called jonjoli in Georgian - the tree in English is the Caucasian Bladdernut, Staphylea colchica. Its a smallish tree (6-10 feet according to Wiki), and the buds are preserved with what from the limited information I can find seems to be a process of pickling in brine with oil and onion added during the process for flavouring. The result is quite a distinctive, strong pickle taste and one I actually really rather like.

Jonjoli are usually served separately not in a salad - though this would be in a Georgian meal where all the dishes are served together for everyone to pick bits from, so it's not like they're meant to be eaten alone. I had a large jar that I'd purchased a while back and I figured this was the occasion to open it, so here we are.

Queries, variants, thoughts and confusions all welcome below!

[Spritelady]

I'm always interested in intriguing salads as I both feel I should consume more vegetables and other such healthy things generally and am also Very Bored of classic lettuce, cucumber, pepper etc salads with balsamic dressing. I may need to investigate adding walnuts/walnut dressing to my own!

[Jubal]

Yes, I'm not sure where one really gets walnut oil in most western countries but it definitely has some differences to olive as a dressing ingredient.

There are some really interesting Persian salad options it's worth looking at as well, which can get much more different to the European cucumber/lettuce standards: I had one not so long ago which was mainly red onion, olives, pomegranate seeds and thin orange slices, which was really nice. Generally fruit in savoury salads is pretty underrated: pears, lettuce, blue cheese and parma ham is a good salad combination too. And there are more basic veg options than we tend to remember: I grew some Purslane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portulaca_oleracea) a year or two ago and used that quite successfully in a couple of salads before my gardening skills turned out to not be up to the task of keeping it alive.