Tabbouleh salad with bulgur: recipe with photo

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

If you want to diversify your regular menu of cold snacks, it's time to pay attention to popular recipes from other nations. Some of them require frilly frills and rare ingredients. For example, today we will master the Arabic salad "Tabouleh", which is quite exotic and at the same time simple to make.

On the basis of what is this dish prepared?

Arabic cuisine often uses bulgur (steamed crushed wheat groats that do not require cooking), so we will use it in our recipe. Tabbouleh is also made from pearl barley, rice and couscous. Connoisseurs and fans of the dish, who were lucky enough to taste it in several variations at once, in most opinions tend to bulgur groats.

How to make Tabbouleh salad: recipe with photo

To begin with, let's evaluate our capabilities and transfer them to our own needs. If we need an easy-to-cook, low-calorie, and besides, a vegetarian dish, then such a saladjust made for us. As ingredients we need:

• bulgur grits – half a glass;
• 2 ripe tomatoes;
• onion feather - 100 g;
• large bunch of parsley;
• lemon - 1 piece;
• olive oil - 4 tbsp. spoons;
• s alt.

Cooking process

Some lovers, when preparing Tabbouleh salad, still boil the bulgur and then wash it. In this case, we will not deviate from the Arab tradition and yet we will only steam the groats. Moreover, it is enough to pour enough boiling water into the container so that the water hides the grains by only 1 cm. Very soon, the mass will swell and become usable.

At this very time, we begin to chop the parsley. There should be a lot of parsley, about half a kilogram, and when ready, the green mass should visually outnumber bulgur in its quantity. You need to chop the parsley finely, so we will arm ourselves with a combine bowl and entrust this process to the machine. Green onions, on the contrary, we chop traditionally - with a knife. Fragrant rings will bring the aesthetics of taste and a good addition to the appearance to Tabbouleh salad.

We take a salad bowl or a bowl, put chopped parsley and onion there, then it's the turn of the tomatoes. We will cut them into as small particles as possible, it is best if you first remove the peel from the round vegetable before cutting. This is easier to do when the tomato is placed in boiling water for a few minutes. Then the skin will crack and will be amenable to cleaning without anyefforts.

Sliced tomatoes are also sent to a bowl of green mass. We will add the swollen groats a little at a time, stirring the salad all the time. We also make sure that the amount of cereal does not exceed the amount of chopped parsley. If we steamed too much bulgur, it can be put in the refrigerator and later used as a dressing for soup.

Mix all the ingredients thoroughly, s alt, sprinkle with lemon juice and season with olive oil. The original Lebanese salad "Tabbouleh" is almost ready, it remains to decorate it with a few mint leaves.

Some recommendations

Arab cuisine has its own subtleties, wisdom and traditions. To prepare a real Tabbouleh salad with bulgur, you must strictly adhere to certain rules:

• Use only small bulgur for salads - a variety called koftelik.
• The ingredients are always dried after washing, this applies to both greens and cereals.
• Before steaming, add a few drops of olive oil to the bulgur, stirring the composition.
• In all Middle Eastern salads, the ingredients are cut as finely as possible.
• Lemon juice is always sent to salad before olive oil. This is done so that the greens crunch on the teeth.
• Tabbouleh salad with bulgur can be served both as an independent dish and as a side dish for meat delights.

Variations on a theme

Ardent adherents of meatfilling dishes can sleep peacefully as long as there is a French version of the appetizer. After all, it is cooked with fried pieces of chicken breast. Let's look at such a more bourgeois recipe. This Tabbouleh salad is based on couscous due to the fact that this cereal is most combined with meat ingredients. Couscous used to be made from millet, but now it has become popular to make it from whole wheat groats.

As ingredients for a real bourgeois salad we need:

• chicken breast - 1 piece;
• couscous - half a glass;
• sweet blue onion - 1 piece;
• one small eggplant;
• one bell pepper (preferably red)
• lemon - 3 pieces;
• zucchini;
• s alt;
• olive oil;
• spices (tarragon, basil, cilantro).

As you can see, the French salad "Tabule", the recipe of which we are now considering, contains a sufficient amount of herbs. Do not be lazy and look for the entire list of ingredients in the store or on the market, and the result will exceed even the wildest expectations.

This dish is positioned as special for true aesthetes and gourmets. Cooking time (due to the roasting of each ingredient separately from each other) - more than one hour.

Start frying vegetables

When eggplants, onions, sweet peppers and zucchini are peeled and chopped, they need to be fried (each component separately) in a little olive oil. The Tabbouleh salad, the recipe of which we are now giving, does not tolerate oil remaining from frying in its composition. Therefore, let's put the fried vegetables in a colander and let the oil drain properly.

Steaming couscous

Grout, as in the previous recipe, we will not cook, but steam it with boiling water or broth. Before steaming couscous, add s alt and a little olive oil to a saucepan, then mix everything.

Olive oil is back in business

Our bourgeois salad "Tabouleh" will not do without fried pieces of chicken breast. 10-15 minutes on a good fire, a little s alt, olive oil and the participation of magic hands - and golden pieces will be ready to fill up an outlandish snack.

Easy salad dressing

The swollen couscous is ready to fill a salad bowl, the vegetables have got rid of excess fat, and the meat has cooled down. It's time to start preparing the dressing, especially since it consists of only three components. Juice squeezed by hand from halved lemons mixed with olive oil and s alt.

It remains only to mix all the ingredients together, pour the Tabouleh salad with lemon dressing and decorate with fragrant herbs. Before serving, the appetizer can be further cooled if desired.

Conclusion

Be sure to cook the Lebanese version of the dish at home, which will make guests rush to the table even from the threshold. Subtle and strong, fresh and fragrant, the blend of mint, parsley and green onions will drive the seasoned gourmet crazy. If greens forlettuce was not just plucked from the garden, it is better to saturate it with additional moisture by dipping it in cold water for 15 minutes. Then dry and put into action.

Bon appetit!