With legumes you can prepare extremely attractive salads, both cold and warm. In this article we are going to give you some ideas so you don't get bored with legume salads.
In a country as leguminous as Spain once was, due to the cheapness and ancestral availability of legumes, now in many cases we have to work hard to get our children to eat legumes. Or many adults.
Legumes have so many virtues that the FAO even declared this year, 2016, the International Year of Pulses. Celebrate it by eating legumes nonstop.
If one positive thing the crisis of recent years has brought us it has been a return to simple, unsophisticated ingredients like legumes, as well as to homemade cooking. Every cloud has a silver lining.
Before detailing each type of salad, we remind you that the essential thing for a successful salad is that the legumes are of good quality and from the same year. If we buy dried legumes it's not the same whether they were dried in the same year as when they are older than a year. Equally, how carefully they have been stored influences quality, although we don't have control over that. Therefore, the ideal is to find a trusted supplier and try.
Although if we want to be sure that the legumes are tasty and tender we have quality canned options at our disposal, both for chickpeas and for white beans, red beans, pocha beans, Judiones de La Granja and lentils. Using canned legumes makes preparing salads much easier since not only do we not have to bother cooking the legumes, but we hardly have to plan anything in advance. We open the can and that's it. They are a perfect solution for summer.
Chickpea salads
The chickpea salad in vinaigrette is a classic of summer tapas. Chickpeas can be accompanied by raw vegetables and canned fishes, such as tuna in oil, chopped tomato and pepper which are typical in this salad. Mixing these ingredients is always a good choice, and you can give it a fun twist if you make the vegetables spiralized (the Spirelli will help), although we can always make salads with more sophisticated and foreign flavors, like this chickpea and carrot salad with oriental flavors.
Ingredients that go well with chickpeas:
- Tomatoes
- Green and red peppers
- Raw and fried onion
- Spring onion
- Fresh herbs like cilantro
- Carrot
- Boiled potato
- Hard-boiled egg
- Cucumber
- Feta cheese
- Canned tuna
- Smoked fish
- Spices like curry, cumin, etc.
Chickpea and carrot salad recipe by El Invitado de Invierno
Lentil salad
Lentil salads are perhaps less seen, but they also have tasty possibilities. In the Middle East and Asia there are delicious cold dishes made with lentils and highly spiced, like the famous mujadara. You can find delicious examples of lentil salads in El Gourmet Vegetariano by Yotam Ottolenghi.
However, I think lentils do not accept all the accompaniments that chickpeas do, although maybe that's due to the habit of seeing chickpeas in salads and not seeing lentils. You have an example in this lentil salad with cumin and preserved lemon, It's delicious!
Ingredients that go well with lentils:
- Olives
- Cucumber
- Nuts
- Preserved lemon Moroccan-style
- Garlic
- Celery
- Wild asparagus
Bean salad
For bean salads, whatever their color, it is indeed essential to use a good raw material. I find that bean salads accept somewhat different accompaniments than the previous ones, with stronger flavors, such as shavings of aged cheeses, or more sophisticated ones, like seafood.
Ingredients that go well with beans:
- Cooked seafood
- Tomato
- Onion
- Garlic
- Cucumber
- Aged cheese
- Assorted mushrooms
All the vegetables accompanying legume salads will be fine chopped with knives, mandolines or spiral cutters.
And of course, all salads should always be well dressed with extra virgin olive oil and quality vinegars.
Adjustable Microplane mandoline, Le Creuset salad bowl and Spirelli spiral cutter by Gefu
Ideas for serving legume salads
Food is eaten with the eyes and it not only has to look appetizing, but we add a plus if we serve it in beautiful dishes.
In this sense, any salad served in a Tokyo Design porcelain salad bowl or in a Le Creuset ceramic salad bowl gets several points higher. Almost enough to earn you a Michelin star.
