August 3 is National Watermelon Day, heralding the time of year when Santorini’s tomato harvest gives up the ghost: too hot, too dry.
But the summer Greek table requires salad, choriatiki salata being the most iconic, and August replaces the best tomatoes on earth with hunks of ripe watermelon as yet another long, hot summer stretches toward fall.
You may know the choriatiki simply as a “Greek salad,” an unpretentious plate of chopped fruit — tomatoes, cucumbers and olives are all fruits, botanically speaking–along with onion, and salty cheese. But the tomato is a relative newcomer to Greece, while the watermelon is practically indigenous. Could the original and most authentic choriatiki have been a watermelon salad, centuries before contact with the Americas?
To know the choriatiki is to glimpse the Greek psyche at its truest. Greek culture is sophisticated, so much so that it sometimes assumes an almost Zen-like simplicity. Coco Chanel comes to mind, for her famous statement that “Elegance is refusal.” Indeed the choritaiki is the LBD of cuisine. Crisp, crunchy, zingy, but unfussy, un-precious, striking in its lack of ornamentation or compromise, stark, pure, austere in its absolute beauty.
“Choriatiki” means “village,” and Americans generally have a hard time remembering this. First, one must understand the utter dryness of Santorini and other islands in the Cyclades. This is a strange place to some, although it’s one of our absolute favorites. Grapes aren’t grown on trellises here, but rather in a ball-formation close to the powder-dry pumice soil. Eggplants here are round, white and sweet, not dark and elongated, and never bitter. The local zucchini grows into a sphere-shape as well, and virtually nothing is irrigated except by the morning sea-fog.
The Mediterranean climate is similar to that of Los Angeles, as real estate agents always say, but there is a major difference: California is not an island, although we may act like islanders, and Americans elsewhere on the continent may wish that we would in fact secede and literally detach from the heartland.
Our water sources face various forms of peril, and controversy. Nevertheless, we do have access to the beleaguered Colorado River, and we do experience significant snowfall in our higher elevations with oft- torrential thaw in the spring. Santorini occasionally gets an astonished dusting of snow, but it’s quite rare. Many homes on this small volcanic island have cisterns, which produce salty water unsuitable for most household uses. Most buildings including the island’s famous blue-domed churches feature curved roofs, to allow the scant rainfall to be captured. But drinking water must still be ferried in from Athens.
“Village” suggests a rustic approach, and a pleasing natural roughness. This means no time is invested in faceting vegetables into prim, seven-sided jewels or slicing anything into perfect matchsticks. This salad’s few ingredients –generally no more than five, and never any lettuce or anything leafy whatsoever, and no salad dressing at all– are handled casually, meaning that the chop tends toward the large side, and geometric symmetry is not a concern. However, the selection of the ingredients is anything but casual, and the YiaYias (grandmothers) of Santorini and other islands wield stubborn quality-control over the sourcing.
The YiaYias will inform you that it is impossible to eat choriatiki outside of Greece, because the ingredients can’t be replicated elsewhere. The usual components are Feta cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, and Kalamata olives. The potential inclusion of green peppers is a source of unending controversy. It is even rumored that some outliers on other islands replace Feta with a softer, whiter cheese, but during our summer travels this news was received with such scorn that we didn’t pursue it further. This is similar to the expression of disbelief that spread across the noble Azteca features of mi amiga’s abuelita (grandmother) when a well-meaning dinner guest arrived with a pea-green bowl of what she called “Whack-a-Mole” (like the game), and mentioned that she had made it with “real mayonnaise.”
Other recipe changes, inevitable in California, are viewed as forms of weakness and moral failure.
Here’s the breakdown:
Feta
The term itself can create civil strife. The Greek word literally means “slab” or “slice,” and this is how Feta is typically presented on the so-called Greek salad in Greece: a slab rested on top of the other ingredients. In cheesemaking terms, “Feta” refers to the technique of salting, pressing and slicing cheese into beechwood barrels filled with brine for a few months.
It is technically incorrect to insist that Feta may only be made of sheep’s milk, or the blend of mostly sheep’s milk mixed with 15 to 30 per cent goat’s milk commonly used in Greece. The term applies to the creation process, not the source of the milk. Sort of.
The cow’s-milk Feta on the shelves at Von’s and Ralph’s and Trader Joe’s is made using the Feta process, and brings bitter tears to a YiaYia’s eyes. Cow’s milk is less gamey than the more tart, tangy-tasting milk from rangier hoof stock. It’s sweeter, blander, more American. Greek Feta– more about the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) in a moment – reflects the importance of the resilient, low-maintenance sheep and goats that roam these rocky islands and their scruffy, bougainvillea-strewn hills that so closely resemble our own.
In the American West, especially in our Southwest, we encounter small metal charms called milagros in Spanish, known as ex votos in Latin, tiny figurative medals that may be pinned to the garment of a bulto or saint figure in a church, or worn or carried as a personal amulet. In Greece, an object with a similar purpose is called a tama, and tamata here are generally thin pieces of metal about the size of a standard business card, stamped with a figure of a problematic body-part, or an image of something deeply desired: a car, a bride, a baby. Tamata of goats, sheep and the hard-working donkeys that navigate the steep trails persist as a form of cosmic insurance even now in these islands which expect 35 million tourists each summer, and recently legalized green pharmacy CBD dispensaries.
Cow’s milk makes sense for the American market: we’ve got land, lots of land under starry skies above, for our bovine billions; Greece doesn’t. The factory-farmed cow’s milk Feta we buy is often dyed to make it resemble sheep-and-goat Feta, and is typically helped along in its proofing process with calcium chloride or whey powder, modern aberrations unwelcome in the Hellenic world.
It’s worth remembering that historians maintain that cheese was made in Greece 8,000 years ago, soon after goats and sheep were first domesticated here. In Homer’s Odyssey which dates from near the end of the 8thcentury BCE, the many-voiced Polyphemus, a.k.a. the Cyclops, is discovered to be a cheesemaker. When Odysseus and his droogs discover the giant’s cave, it’s furnished with crates of ripening cheese, buckets and baskets used for cheese-cooking, and pens of lactating livestock. In those days, “feta” was the generic word for cheese itself, and thus Polyphemus may be considered the one-eyed Father of All Feta.
Greek Feta-makers explain that the sheep and goats that provide their distinctive milk nibble on some 6,000 varieties of wildflowers and grasses unique to this arid area of the Mediterranean as they have done for millennia, and that this specific bouquet of dubiously edible flora – including thistles, wild mustard greens and prickly-pear cactus fruits — gives the local dairy products their terroir, or feisty signature character.
Today, the word “Feta” carries legal clout in the European Union, which in 2002 granted PDO status to Greek Feta, which by definition is exclusively ovine and caprine, made only with sheep-and-goat milk, or just sheep’s milk. Other countries proud of their cheesemaking, notably Germany and Denmark which contested this ruling while in progress for 16 years, were given five years to stop production or rename their cheeses. But caveat emptor: this ruling does not apply in the USA, and so we encounter all manner of Greek-style cheeses that call themselves “Feta” without the cred.
Tomatoes
A gift of the New World to the Old, tomato seeds did not reach Greece, specifically the island of Syros, until 1818 while the country was still under Ottoman rule. A tiny, intensely flavorful cultivar about the size of our modern cherry tomato soon was developed on Santorini. In 1915, the country’s first tomato cannery opened in Nafplio (Nauplio), and tomato-farming flourished until yet another earthquake rocked Santorini in 1956, shutting down production until further notice.
Of course we all know better than to buy large tomatoes at the supermarket, since these are almost always picked while green, schlepped in from points unknown, gassed to goose along forced ripening, and end up tasting like wet styrofoam. Our region is blessed with year-round farmers markets, and many of our friends and neighbors grow love-apples in community gardens and on their own property. These undoubtedly taste better, and we especially like them in tones of purple, yellow, black, bumpy, baroque, glossy but gnarly, heirloom-ugly.
But the bad news is, these don’t really taste like Greek tomatoes, either. Cherry tomatoes—from anywhere—seem closest, in my opinion. Sun-dried tomatoes capture the needed deep vibrancy of taste but seem out of place in choriatiki.
Watermelon
Watermelons predate tomatoes in Greece by about 1800 years. The ancestors of the modern watermelon took root in northeastern Africa, called gurum in Sudan and gurma in Egypt, and watermelon seeds as well as paintings of watermelons with yellow and orange flesh have been found in the tombs of the Pharoahs. Mark Twain wrote that to taste a watermelon is to know “what the angels eat,” and by Twain’s time, intense hybridization had produced a watermelon with a Skittles-high sugar content and the rosy-pink flesh which accompanies that sweetening mutation.
However, although we’re celebrating watermelon with our recipe, tomatoes are superior to watermelon when making choriatiki. The reason is that tomatoes, especially good ones, though technically a fruit, are acidic. Watermelon is not. And the tomato’s high concentration of glutamic acid, the natural source of MSG, paired with the sulfenic acid of sliced onion, salty cheese and cured olives, sets up an almost instant chemical reaction in the salad bowl that makes salad dressing unnecessary. The interaction of this most dynamic of culinary trinities — acid, salt, and fat – pulls the water-content from the cucumbers and creates a potent emulsification within one hour.
Because watermelon is far more mild-mannered, you may want to risk the wrath of the YiaYias and add more salt. A splash of white vinegar might also up the ante, as would the juice of a lemon, semi-pickling the ingredients, but this sort of tampering may lead to tragic head-shaking, deep sighs of resignation, and stern lectures. You’ve been warned.
Kalamata olives
Kalamata is a city in the southern Peloponnese. Some records suggest that these large, lustrous, elegantly pointed, purple-brown oval olives are named for “Virgin Mary with beautiful eyes.” As with Greek Feta, within the European Union and other countries that ratified PDO agreements or similar laws, the name “Kalamata” in reference to olives is protected with PDO status, meaning that the term may only be applied to olives and olive oil from the region around Kalamata. Grown elsewhere, they may be called “Kalamon.” And as always, here in the States, these rules don’t apply and we’re on our own out here in the Wild, Wild West.
Kalamata olives are essential to even the most loosely conceptualized choriatiki because they cannot be harvested green, and are tree-ripened and hand-picked. They are prone to bruising, as is all ripe produce. Their wine-like flavor profile arises from the natural lactobacillus yeast that continues to grow on the olive’s skin throughout the curing process.
One of the most dismal treks in my olive-loving life took place when my husband and I fled Los Angeles for the Kombucha-swilling, flannel shirt-wearing redwood coast due west of Reno. There wasn’t an actual restaurant, or even a Mickey D’s, for hours in any direction, but one stormy afternoon the isolation got to me, so I drove and drove to a remote eatery and ordered a “Greek Salad,” hoping for miracles. Dozens of soggy, squishy rings of canned, sliced Black California olives dumped over sad icebox (iceberg) lettuce, topped with a shake of stale “Pizza Topping” according to the jar (a sawdust-like Parmesan? blend) was what I got. I could taste the lye used to oxidize ordinary unripe green olives to their signature black shade, far, far from the fierce sun and impossibly turquoise aphros (the fabled seafoam that carried Aphrodite to shore) of the Aegean.
The lesson: find Kalamatas. Here in our greater Los Angeles area, they are not difficult to source. If for some reason you can’t locate some, choose Halkidiki (huge green olives from Greece) or even Nicoise—anything but those insipid canned olive-Life Savers.
…and as for cucumbers, onions…
And finally, the laws start to lighten up a little when it comes to these next ingredients. The most important thing to consider when choosing your cukes, English, Persian or otherwise, is whether or not they’ve been waxed. Those that we find in the supers are generally waxed, necessitating peeling, because no one wants to chew on something that tastes like a candle.
If the cucumber I find has not been waxed, I sometimes take a fork and rake long vertical grooves into the skin, then slice it into discs, then chop the discs into quarters for the salad. The grooves are purely decorative.
The red onion is the most common choice for the bulbous allium element, and for good reason. It’s sweeter than a big white or yellow onion, and the color is harmonious with the white, red, green, purple palette of the five core ingredients.
That said, shallots, chopped scallions (“spring onions”) and chopped chives are also good here. Sometimes I use several types of onions for a slightly reckless, feral garden feel.
A word about garlic. Garlic is typically not added to choriataki because the natural emulsion is so savory. If you simply can’t help yourself, take a cut clove or two and “dress” the inside of your mixing bowl with it. Also note that in Greece, cooks are horrified by the common practice of smashing garlic, which they say ruins the oil. Instead, Greek cooks tend to prefer to respectfully peel and cut garlic.
Are green herbs welcome in choriatiki? Dill, mint, basil, cilantro, Italian parsley, are not part of the five key elements, and so the most Spartan, Stoic, severe interpreters of the choriatiki code would say no. I frequently break this rule, however, for the freshness and perfume that herbs impart.
For 4 large servings, you’ll need:
- 2 large cucumbers, probably peeled
- One fist-sized red onion, peeled
- A slab of Feta about the size of the palm if your hand
- About 2 cups of chopped raw tomato or watermelon
- 20 or so Kalamata olives. Slice a few of the olives lengthwise, leaving the rest whole. Be sure to check for pits.
The prep
Greek food is more about taking pride in superior ingredients versus painstaking technique. Measurements are done by eye. Figure on equal parts of the five core ingredients, and simply cut everything into bite-sized chunks. The Feta may be treated this way if you find that top-side slab of Feta less than dainty.
To dress or not to dress? Some recipes call for a drizzle of olive oil. Yum, but I’ve never found it necessary. Same for a splash of vinegar. If you like it, use it, but you don’t need to.
Using watermelon instead of tomato usually calls for a bit of additional seasoning. Give the chunked watermelon a twist or two of freshly ground black pepper and a pinch of sea salt or Kosher salt. Note that the salt will cause the watermelon to begin “melting” or breaking down structurally almost immediately. If you’re using tomatoes, you may or may not need to add more salt, depending upon your tomatoes and the character of your Feta. A pinch or two of dried oregano in the bowl adds even more depth.
This is a salad that does not travel especially well and can tolerate no more than one full day in the fridge as leftovers. After that time has passed, the onion-Feta-fermented olive emulsion turns harsh to the tongue, not to mention powerfully stinky, and has reduced all of the watery bits to mush.
In Greece, the ingredients are assembled, not blended, and immediately served on a plate, often accompanied by loaf-style bread versus pita. Remember that in the most authentic style, the Feta is not crumbled into the mixture, but rests on top in a slab. I break this rule, adding the cheese into the bowl. I also admit that I like to give mine a few turns with a wooden spoon and then let it get ye down and get ye funky, covered, in the fridge for an hour or so before serving. Doing so magnifies the robust flavors.
If I’m bringing the choriatiki in a bowl to a party rather than crafting individual plates in my own kitchen, I always top the bowl with transparent, thin, overlapping slices of whole lemon and a handful of bouganivillea flowers.
Let’s talk about cheating
Keeping the choriatiki on the straight and narrow employing only the five core ingredients is an act of Apollonian self-control. When done in this way, it is sublime. But my nature is more Dionysian, and my esthetic a bit more on the Byzantine side than the strictly Athenian. Here are a few additional undisciplined digressions:
- To make this into a main course for a larger group, add cooked rice, Orzo pasta, or small elbow macaroni
- To make it Californian, add (what else?) chunks of ripe avocado
- To Italicize it, add marinated artichoke hearts, hearts of palm
- To make it crunchier and a bit more interesting, add chopped sweet peppers, chopped celery
- To make it creamier, more lush and less harsh, use chèvre—goat cheese—or Gorgonzola instead of Feta, or go half-and-half. Yes, this is sacrilege. And it’s also delicious.
- To add vegan protein, add drained garbanzo beans, dark red kidney beans
- To add protein and make it “extra,” add large, cooked, cleaned, chilled prawns or other premium seafood. Surprisingly, frozen bay shrimp can also work.
- For a festive, Turkish vibe, blend in a handful of chopped mint, a handful of sliced almonds, and top with garnet-brilliant pomegranate arils (seeds). I even add chopped dates and chopped dried apricots if I’m feeling lavish. Serving it this way makes it extraordinary with outdoor-coal-roasted lamb kebabs.
In the dark days before “My Octopus Teacher,” I would have recommended grilled ceph as the entrée, but I have since seen the light. The most classic accompaniment: whole, split broiled fish as a main course, whole sardines if you can get them. IYKYK: fresh sardines have a delicate, trout-like flavor and are nothing like the slippery, burp-a-licious fillets in the roll-top can. Buttered rock lobster torched on the barbie is also exquisite yet rugged, in keeping with the toughness and beauty of the choriatiki’s island origins.
