Salsa Verde – with a twist!

—

5 March 2019 BY Julie Biuso

Invite the friends, pour the drinks and wow them with a sensational salsa verde.

Ingredients

4 hard-boiled (hard-cooked) eggs, (read about cooking eggs Eggs) ¼ tsp salt ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil 2 gherkins 12 pimento-stuffed green olives 1 Tbsp capers, rinsed ½-1 Tbsp sherry vinegar Freshly ground black pepper 3 Tbsp finely chopped parsley 2 Tbsp snipped chives

Method

1 You only need the egg yolks in this recipe. Shell eggs, extract yolks. Put yolks in a bowl with salt, mash well, and work in the oil a little at a time. Dry gherkins and olives with paper towels. Rinse and drain capers and pat dry, then chop everything finely (not to a paste, keep it lumpy). Mix in a little sherry vinegar to taste and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. Finally, add the parsley and chives.

2 The salsa can be prepared several hours and up to 2 days in advance. Cover and keep it at room temperature. Transfer to the fridge for longer storage.

Recipe Notes

Salsa verde is a tangy caper and herb sauce. This version is a bit of an oddball, more like a mayonnaise, with tangy ingredients added to lightly cooked eggs. It’s sensational!

And it’s easy to put together providing you get the eggs right. If they are liquid, it’s not going to be so pleasant, but if they are overooked, well, it will be like trying to get wet ingredients to blend with rubber. Look at the picture. That is what you need to aim for, a semi-set egg yolk. Read about cooking eggs here Eggs

What to do with the left-over egg whites? If you like tender egg white, roughly chop them and bundle them on top of a cauliflower salad with lashings of seasonings, olive oil, chopped gherkins and olives, that sort of thing, or add to a bacon butty. I can’t help you out any more than that, because guess what? I love eggs, but egg whites on their own give me the heebie jeebies. So there you go.

Let’s talk about more pleasant things, like how do you use the salsa? Oh, so many ways …. It’s fabulous on its own on crusty bread croûtes or crackers with a glass of wine (salty, tangy, sends your taste buds into overdrive). Spread on crusty bread and stacked with smoked fish or smoked or hot-smoked salmon, it’s a substantial balanced snack. You can take this a step further and start with toasted sour dough bread spread with salsa verde, put in a bowl and top with salad Niçoise or a tuna salad of some description. Perfect! And a dollop or two alongside hot corned beef or a pot roasted chicken will add a welcome tang.

Capers