Earthy summer salad with spicy and sweet undertones
Kohlrabi is quite a comical vegetable, both in name and shape. It’s got nothing to do with Jewish rabbis, but the name is old Austrian German for “cabbage turnip”. But since its appearance is so endearingly strange, I decided to try grow them in our terrace garden. I had to weed some out to give space for a very dominant cabbage, and discovered that it adds great crunch and a mild cabbage flavour to salads. It’s great mixed with sweet, earthy beetroot, bitter salad leaves like rocket, salty cheese and savoury chives, and topped with a sweet mustard dressing. The thin kohlrabi slices look rather posh too, if you’re trying to impress someone.
The kohlrabi you grow at home can be harvested before it grows larger than an apple, as it might become too wooden later. If you buy from the shop, it might be fully grown and therefore have a hard peel which you need to remove. Either way, you can slice it very thinly, and eat it raw to best appreciate the mild flavour.
You need:
– 2 handfuls rocket,
– 2 large beetroots, cooked and roughly chopped
– 2 young thinly sliced kohlrabi, with chopped leaves (if they look cheery enough)
– Half a bunch scallions, chopped
– Half a feta cheese bloc, cubed
– Half a handful chives, chopped
– Honey mustard dressing (mix one quarter each of apple cider vinegar, honey, dijon mustard and a neutral oil + 1 teaspoon salt)
– Salted peatnuts
No complicated instructions needed here: just toss all the ingredients together and add a few tablespoons of dressing. The dressing benefits from standing for a while, so it’s good if you can make it in advance. To slice the kohlrabi as thinly as possible you might want to use a potato peeler, unless you have some sort of kitchen gadget that will do that for you.
