Tabbouleh

A parsley salad with bulgur in it, not a bulgur salad with parsley on top — the proportion is the dish.

Vegan.

Ingredients

• 400 g flat-leaf parsley, very finely chopped
• 60 g fine bulgur
• a large handful of mint, finely chopped
• 4 tomatoes, finely diced
• 4 spring onions, finely sliced
• juice of 3 lemons
• 120 ml olive oil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• black pepper

to serve

• little gem or cos leaves

Method

1. IT IS A PARSLEY SALAD WITH BULGUR IN IT, NOT A BULGUR SALAD WITH PARSLEY ON TOP. Four hundred grams of parsley against sixty of bulgur -- nearly seven to one, and by volume once chopped it looks like twenty to one. That proportion IS the dish. What arrives at the table is overwhelmingly green, with grains of bulgur findable through it as a texture rather than as a component. The version most people have eaten reverses this, with a mound of wet grain and a sprinkling of herbs, and is a different and much duller thing. Nothing else here matters as much as buying far more parsley than seems sensible.
2. THE BULGUR IS SOAKED COLD, IN THE LEMON JUICE, AND NEVER BOILED. Sixty grams of the fine grade covered in the lemon juice and left twenty minutes. Fine bulgur is already parboiled, so it needs only hydrating -- and hydrating it in lemon rather than water means the grain itself carries the sourness instead of being a bland filler in a dressed salad. There is no tomato paste anywhere in this, which is what separates it from the red bulgur salads it otherwise resembles.
3. THE PARSLEY IS CHOPPED WITH A VERY SHARP KNIFE AND MUST BE DRY. Washed well in advance and dried thoroughly in a cloth or a spinner, because wet parsley bruises as it is cut and the salad turns dark and slimy within an hour. A sharp knife cuts; a blunt one crushes and the parsley bleeds green onto the board. A food processor is the worst of all -- it pulps.
4. THE STALKS ARE REMOVED AND THAT IS MOST OF THE WORK. Leaves picked off by hand, which for four hundred grams takes a good twenty minutes. Stalks are fibrous and stay as hard threads in the finished salad however finely they are cut.
5. THE TOMATOES ARE DICED AND ADDED LAST, UNDRAINED. Their juice is part of the dressing. But they go in at the very end: left to sit in the salted salad they collapse and flood it.
6. IT IS DRESSED AND EATEN WITHIN THE HOUR. Salt draws water out of parsley, so a tabbouleh dressed in the morning is a wet green heap by lunchtime. Everything can be chopped and kept separate; the salt, oil and tomato go in at the table.
7. The parsley washed WELL IN ADVANCE and dried thoroughly.
8. The leaves PICKED FROM THE STALKS by hand and the stalks discarded.
9. The leaves chopped very fine with a VERY SHARP knife. Not processed.
10. The fine bulgur covered in the LEMON JUICE and left to soak 20 MINUTES. No water, no heat.
11. The soaked bulgur, parsley, mint and spring onions combined.
12. The olive oil, salt and pepper added and turned through.
13. The diced tomatoes folded in LAST, with their juice.
14. TESTED: a forkful should be mostly green, with bulgur findable as a texture rather than as a mound. If it looks like a grain salad there is not enough parsley in it.
15. Served within the hour, with leaves to scoop it.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Lebanon · All recipes