Olive Salad
This recipe is inspired by Central Grocery’s muffuletta sandwich, which is loaded with Italian cold cuts, fine cheese, and olive salad. By the way, if you are headed toward the French Quarter in New Orleans, make sure you visit Decatur Street on any day other than Sunday, when the Central Grocery is closed – you do not want to miss out on this sandwich!
I recommend a food processor for this salad; though all ingredients can be chopped by hand. Decide how coarse a salad you would like, and be consistent in keeping all elements more or less in range. You can also decide how intense you would like the flavors to be by choosing heavily cured olives, adding more garlic, or adding the heat of a few hot peppers to the Pepperoncini’s. Likewise, instead of using Kalamata olives, you could use the canned black olives, which are extremely mild and cut back on the garlic if you do not like the more robust flavor of this salad. Either way, the salad will keep four to six weeks, in the refrigerator; simply make sure you are storing the unused portion in a clean container, with an air-tight lid.
You will want to make your olive salad three to six days before you plan to serve it. The more time the elements are given to intermingle and absorb each other’s flavors, the better it will be! Not only can you use this salad on sandwiches, but it can be served as a dip with baked pita’s, added to cream cheese to make a creamy tapenade type spread to serve over bruschetta, rolled up in ham with blanched asparagus for an amazing salad course, spread over tomato halves, topped with a slice of almost any type of cheese and broiled for five minutes for an amazing side dish to accompany roasted meats, spread over baked chicken, or added potato salad. Master olive salad – the possibilities are endless!
Recipe:
1 Cup of Black Oil Cured Olives – I recommend Kalamata
1 Cup of Large Green Olives – stuffed with Pimentos
6-10 Pepperoncini’s
3 Teaspoons of Capers
½ Cub of Pickled Cauliflower
2 Stalks of fresh Celery
2 large fresh Carrots
1 large Onion
2-4 Cloves of Garlic
3 Tablespoons of Italian Parsley
3 Tablespoons of Oregano
1 Tablespoon of Celery Seed
1 Cup of Olive Oil
¼ to ½ cup of Vinegar (I sometimes replace the Vinegar with Lemon Juice, which I would say is less traditional, but more in line with my palate.)
Salt and Freshly Ground Pepper to taste – make sure you do taste before salting, as many of the above ingredients are salted
Directions:
I recommend chopping two or three ingredients at time, in a food processor, to maintain consistency in size; but this can also be done by hand. Place all chopped ingredients in a large glass container, and cover with olive oil and vinegar. Cover bowl tightly and place in the refrigerator to cure for a few days. Enjoy!
