Greek Salad and the Dodgy Sheep's Cheese

Greek salad is a dish which I have never managed to get very wrong. Today I tweaked the dressing and it turned out fine, so here is the (mostly) unquantified recipe:

From: Wikimedia Commons, by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos
Licensed under GNU Free Documentation License, 1.2



Cucumber
Tomatoes
Red, yellow, and green bell pepper
Onion
Feta cheese
Olives

Vinaigrette:
White wine (I had a Riesling from l'Alsace)
Apple cider vinegar
Salt
Sugar
Black pepper
Oregano

For my attempt I wanted enough to feed my family, so seven people, and we had faux-tzatziki (yoghurt, cold milk, chopped onion, grated cucumber, salt, pepper, white wine) as well as flatbread and spaghetti with it.

There were 3 or 4 tomatoes, 1 3/5 of a cucumber, the 3 bell peppers and one onion; the quantity of feta and olives was pretty arbitrary but we like both so there was plenty. The rest of the cucumber went into the tzatziki and the rest of the red bell pepper, where only the top was used for the salad, turned into the bowl in which I put part of the tzatziki.

One of the grand questions of the Greek salad is, of course, the separation of the respective ingredients according to the laws of attractivity. The feta can be cubed or broken into crumbs or divided into tidy slabs, the cucumber cut into chunks of varying largeness and sometimes peeled in stripes at little distances from each other so that the shades of the dark green peel and the lighter pith contrast, and so on. Of course the onion looks even better when it is red-purple and yellow heirloom tomatoes are picturesque if you can get them. Every now and then photos of someone's ingenious Greek salad presentation ideas appear on Tastespotting and Foodgawker; I tend to consider them as principally aspirational since I am a bit of a lazy cook. Since I'm still experimenting I have no profound insight to offer.

First I cut up the onion, to marinate it in the vinaigrette in order to blunt its edge. Then came the other ingredients.

Otherwise our salad dressing has olive oil and red wine vinegar (or lemon juice) in it, but as far as I could tell this variant tasted quite refined and light, and only had more vinegar than necessary.

*

The feta cheese was a minor adventure. We sometimes buy the cheese* in cylindrical cans with a pull tab; but they have a clever second plastic lid tucked under them, which can be pried off and then used to cover the can once the original metal one is opened.

*(called sheep's or goat's cheese here since under European Union regulations only cheese made in particular parts of Greece according to the proper feta method can be denominated feta)

The problem is that this particular can happened not to have enough brine, so there was a grey speck on one round of cheese and it was doubtful if it was properly preserved. When we taste-tested the feta, it turned out that it was in fact not properly milky and salty, but a little bitter. So we threw out this cheese and used the can of goat's cheese instead.

Since we only needed one round of goat's cheese for the salad my brother baked the second one in the oven, after sprinkling enough paprika over it to cover the top in clayey red.

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My brother and I were wondering if eating the spoiled feta sheep's cheese was as stupid as it seems. But I figured that if it was botulism the can would have been bulging and we would have keeled over swiftly. When I told the tale of our culinary experimentation to Papa (who is the professional and the household arbiter on questions in fields like medicine and sciences) he looked predictably unimpressed by our doubtful common sense but agreed with the botulism-related conclusions.

As of the writing of this blog post we are both alive and thriving.

*

P.S.: In the r.W.a. (relevant Wikipedia article) it mentions that in the 1920s an Australian newspaper ran this recipe for a "Greek salad": boiled vegetable marrow with sour milk. If the Spartans ate this and ate it regularly, perhaps this explains their obsolescence.