Green Salad with Pickled Red Cabbage

TÜRKÇE İÇİN TIKLAYIN
PER ITALIANO

I like mixing my pickled red cabbage into my green salad.

Ingredients:
Green salad like Romaine lettuce, leaf lettuce, iceberg
Pickled red cabbage
Extra virgin olive oil
Sapa or balsamic vinegar
Salt

In salads where I use pickled red cabbage I often use Sapa as condiment if I have it at home. 

I don't know if you ever used or even heard of Sapa which is also called as "vino cotto" in southern Italy or "saba" in other places. 

"Sapa is made fom must, boiled slowly in dedicated pots until the evaporation lowers the volume to one third of the initial. The high concentration of sugar prevents fermentation, so contains no alcohol and, once packaged, is used as a condiment or sauce. It’s good with cheese, but also with fruit, over ice cream, with corn meal, with meat and many other ways"

This is how it is described on the web page of the product which we have at home.

Given the fact that it is a traditional Italian product, I don't know how easily you could find it in your country, maybe in a gourmet shop or on internet. Just as an example I would like to share with you the result of my short search which took me to this page which belongs to a traditional Italian producer that sells in Australia.

I had heard that also pekmez, which is a molasses-like syrup, is made by boiling grapes. Since I had both, out of curiosity, I decided to make a small comparison at home. I added also balsamic vinegar of Modena in my comparison list.

The result of my small experiment is as follows: 
- Sapa is a sweet and sour dressing. 
- It turns out Pekmez is much sweeter as opposed to sapa's sweet and sour flavour. 
- Balsamic vinegar has a strong vinegar taste in comporison with those two.

Let me proceed to the salad recipe...


Preparation:

• Wash and drain salad. Dry with a salad spinner. Cut it. (I usually use scissors to cut leaves)
• Add pickled red cabbage onto your salad (draining them off the vinegar)
• Dress it with olive oil.
• Add sapa or vinegar and salt as needed considering that pickled red cabbage has already absorbed some vinegar and salt. 

Enjoy...