Lately I’ve been challenging myself more to cook with ingredients I am not that familiar with, and fennel is just one of those. While analysing this tendency of mine, I’ve reached the conclusion that it might be a consequence of growing up in post-communist Romania. Being deprived of much of the non-native to Romania produce that the West had access to, I’ve grown quite obsessed with them. It can get quite maddening when guests come over and instead of serving a regular dish that would work with everyone, I´ll run a risk and come up with something half crazy – salads in particular refuse to do the boring way, as demonstrated here. So I took inspiration for this particular salad from a fennel and tangerine salad online from this site, but I swapped it for oranges and added the salmon before coming up with this final version, which now that I’ve tried over and over again, I am happy to share with you too.
Ingredients
two fresh medium sized fennels
two oranges
a 250g burrata
200g of smoked salmon
a tsp of butter
a handful of fresh basil leaves
a tbsp red wine vinegar
a tbsp olive oil
a crushed garlic head
the juice of half a squeezed lemon
a tsp of honey
Instructions
- Using a mandolin slice the fennel finely and sauté it along with the butter in a large pan until it gets a golden colour.
- Peel the orange and slice it horizontally into round slices. NB: You can then halve these if you find them too big.
- Now to the dressing – mix the vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice, honey and the crushed garlic head in a small recipient and set aside.
- Start assembling the salad – first comes the sautéed fennel, then the chopped smoked salmon, then the orange, and finally the burrata.
- Break the burrata apart, sprinkle the whole salad with your dressing, and decorate it with the basil leaves before serving.
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