Salad
Cucumber and yoghurt salad
Cold cucumber, garlic and yoghurt salad eaten all summer beside grilled meat and beans.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 40 min
- Cook
- —
- Total
- 40 min
- Fasting
- Not suitable
Ingredients 9 ingredients
Method
- Peel the cucumbers and slice them thin on the coarse side of a box grater, or cut them into small dice. Salt them lightly and leave them in a sieve for ten minutes.
- Crush the garlic to a paste with the salt under the flat of a knife, then work the oil into the paste. The oil takes the raw edge off the garlic before it meets the yoghurt.
- Beat the yoghurt smooth in a bowl. If it is mild rather than sharp, add the vinegar.
- Squeeze the cucumber in your hand, gently, and stir it into the yoghurt along with the garlic paste.
- Chill for at least half an hour. The salad is loose at first and thickens as it stands; if it goes too far, slacken it with a spoonful of cold water.
- Scatter over the walnuts and dill just before serving and dust with paprika. Added any earlier, the walnuts go soft.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- Sheep's yoghurt
- Full-fat natural yoghurt; Greek yoghurt works if you let it down with two or three spoons of cold water
- Aleva piperka (Macedonian ground sweet red paprika)
- Sweet Hungarian paprika — not smoked, which takes the salad somewhere else entirely
- Balkan ridge cucumbers
- Half a long English cucumber, halved lengthways with the wet seed core scraped out
