This winter salad recipe discovery happened in Paris. I took my brand new shiny husband (we’d only been married a year) to stay with a family I had grown up with; The Douillets have taught me almost everything I know about French food (Elizabeth David, the best food writer ever, filled in the blanks).
They made a simple meal of Quiche Lorraine, Tarte tomate à la moutarde and an endive & avocado salad. I knew the salad would be good as I love avocado, but I had no expectations of the endive. If you’ve never eaten endive raw in a salad, you must, it’s a delight. The flavour is mildly bitter which works so well with creamy rich avocado and the texture of the endive leaves is super crisp; it bizarrely feels like you’re biting into tiny bubbles of water.
Endive and avocado are all in season during the winter months. Endive (chicory) and the extra virgin rape seed oil are British, so even better!
Miraculous ingredients: Endives (chicory), Hass avocado, extra virgin olive oil or extra virgin rape seed oil
Endive & avocado with a French dressing
Ingredients
2 fresh endives (chicory)
1 large Hass avocado
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar
6 tablespoons of extra virgin rape seed oil or extra virgin olive oil
coarse sea salt flakes
Method
First make the French dressing in the salad bowl. Whisk the Dijon mustard and white wine vinegar together until all the mustard has dissolved into the vinegar. Add a tiny amount of oil and whisk vigorously to create an emulsion with the mustard, vinegar and oil. That tiny amount of oil will have made the start of a thick dressing in the bowl. Add another small amount of oil and whisk hard to incorporate it into the emulsion. Add all the remaining oil and whisk to form a slightly thick yellow dressing.
Slice the endive across it’s width into 3cm pieces. Peel and stone the avocado and roughly chop into large bite size chunks. Add the endive slices and avocado chunks to the French dressing, mix, season with a little sea salt and eat up.
Preparation time 10 minutes, serves 4