Windset Farms® Tuna Niçoise Salad

Chef Dana Reinhardt from Windset Farms® makes Tuna Niçoise Salad.

Duration:5:38

Nothing like some crisp vegetables on a sunny summer weekend to Dana Reinhardt executive chef with Windset farms here with me at Cookworks on Broadway at Granville once again for Saturday Chefs, because summer salads and instead of like an exotic, well European sophisticated, French salad.

This is a take on a Nicoise salad. It's a traditional salad from Nice in southern France, and actually it's the name of the olives that you usually use as well.

Okay, so I'm going to be using kind of a palette of some of the Windset vegetables to counteract. There’s tuna, there's some olives and potatoes and egg. So, this Windset base is a really nice kind of crisp fresh counterpoint to the heavier kind of stronger flavors that we're gonna be adding to the salad.

Okay, so what do we what are we using different ways to do it?

Well, I'm going to be using some of the Maestro peppers and some of the Concerto tomatoes which I know you love, right, which one we're going to slice and how to throw into the salad and then our Fresco seedless cucumbers.

Okay, to start with, I'm going to make a dressing and I just want to talk about the eggs because I get asked this all the time about how to make a perfect soft boiled egg. I need to know this. And this is a surefire trick that works every time. So you basically take your eggs from your fridge, put them in a pot, cover them with cold water, okay, they go onto the stove and as soon as they come to a high simmer, boil, turn it down to just a simmer. Okay, set your timer for six minutes. Take them off, run them under cold water. You don't have to cover them or anything? No, nothing, just six minutes every time underneath the cold water and if you give them a little crack, the cold water actually runs underneath the shell makes them much easier to peel as well.

So you get the beautiful boiled egg here with the lovely bright orange yolk. Works every time. Okay, so now I know six minutes so I'm gonna get you to start the dressing and I've got a mortar and pestle here and a clove of garlic so I'm gonna get you to kind of crush that up. And I'm gonna throw a little bit of salt in there too. So we're going to make a little paste with those two and you can use any type of green but I have our lovely Windset Delicado and I've mixed it with a little bit of red leaf lettuce for some color and I'm going to throw in the Concertos. Very good. Just it's kind of fun actually.

Just mash that up. Good some of the maestro peppers. That sounds good. It's got nice all of these nice suas Alright, little black columns. Okay, great. So that's gonna be I'm just console message just a tiny, tiny bit more to get more aggressive. Are you really mad if you're angry? Well, I'm gonna get you to whiskey ingredients together. So we're going to take that garlic that we've mashed and that's going to be the basis and then we're gonna get some shallots. Just a little spoonful, some Dijon mustard, actually a good shot of Dijon because that's gonna give you a nice acidity, a tiny bit of some lovely honey for balance in the dressing. Traditionals don't have honey in the salad. Some of them do. But and classic red wine vinegar. Mix that there we go you're making a mess and you didn't get me and it's got a nice emulsified texture Now that's perfect. Okay. And then basically we toss and once we toss we have on there it is. Because we have summer this is so beautiful. Isn't that nice and colorful? And the crunch from the cucumber and the maestro peppers, the frescoes and the concerto tomatoes.

Now some nice ones salads will have green beans or the traditional would have anchovies?

there's lots of variations. Anchovies traditional. Tuna is a little bit more modern. Anchovy and tuna are quite acceptable. I've also seen nice was in France with artichoke hearts, capers, so you can mix it up a bit.

I like to try it. Thank you very much,

Presenter: Dana Reinhardt, Chef, Vancouver, BC

Local Practitioners: Chef