Desert Views

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A salad, inspired by the most incredible fruit and a trip to the Californian Desert (Rcp# 51)

Ingredients for ‘Desert Views’

For the mountains (baked tofu pyramids):

  • 400 – 450 g tofu (natural, soy or chickpea based)
  • 1 recipe ‘Barboquentin’ (see [‘The Sauce Brothers’] plus 500 ml water (replace the salt in the recipe with ½ teaspoon smoked sea salt)
  • Canola oil (for greasing baking paper and covering pyramids)
  • Brown millet flour (for coating)

For the desert landscape:

  • Half a large pomegranate, peeled and cleaned
  • Half a medium sweet melon (cantaloupe or similar), quartered and thinly sliced
  • 80-100g green olives (pitted, sliced, cooled from jar)
  • 5 leaves radiccio salad, washed and cut into strips (for easy tossing)
  • 4 – 5 large handfuls mixed dark green salads ( arugula, oak leaf, romana), washed and torn into convenient pieces

For the dressing:

  • 3 tablespoons apple pulp (high quality applesauce without additives, see [‘The Apple Pulp Connection’])
  • 5 tablespoons pomegranate juice
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 5 tablespoons oat yogurt
  • Pinch of salt
  • 2 teaspoons dark balsamic vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons apricot or date syrup
  • 8 – 10 tablespoons water
  • optional: 1 tablespoon fine nut oil (such as buckwheat or pistachio)


Preparations for ‘Desert Views’

  • Desert landscape:
    1. Place the mixed salad leaves in individual salad bowls for each serving or one big salad bowl
    2. Mix the other ingredients and place them on top.
  • Mountains:
    1. Cut the tofu block(s) diagonally into four symmetrical pyramids (two pairs) with rectangle bottoms. Then, from the top diagonal, cut through the rectangle bottom again to make irregular pyramids with triangular bottoms.
    2. Marinade these pyramids in the liquefied Barboquentin sauce for 3-5 hours (or overnight). You will need to carefully move these pyramids frequently during the first hour to make sure the marinade gets to all parts of the tofu.
    3. Place two layers of parchment paper on a baking sheet and coat generously with oil to get a thick film of oil on the paper (that’s why you need two layers, so the liquid doesn’t soak through).
    4. Remove the tofu from the marinade (save the marinade to make a pasta sauce later) and turn them in brown millet flour (make a thin layer of the flour on a large plate) until they are completely covered. Then flip them in the canola oil on the baking sheet so that the flour crust is oiled.
    5. Bake the pyramids at 175°C for 20-25 minutes (preheated circumference plus top and bottom heat), frequently changing the position of the tofu pieces (after about 10 minutes) so they bake from all sides. Careful, do not burn yourself!
  • Dressing:
    1. Mix the syrup and water until the syrup is dissolved.
    2. Add the rest of the dressing ingredients, except the yogurt, plus the syrup water and stir well.
    3. Gently stir in the yogurt last.

Side Notes:

  1. This was inspired by a trip to the California desert regions. You’ll find the story in this month’s Ingredient Special on Pomegranate [‘Geode with Ruby Gems’].

Please note: For all my recipes (text) on this blog (By MagS, Parsley-Lane Blog) I grant a CC license under the terms of BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). For further explanations, please see the Legal Notice or visit creativecommons.org.