Crispy salami salad
We love salami, big time, and if we ever need any justification to gorge on it (we don’t), we only have to look to the Italians. Anecdotally, they really seem to eat a ton of the stuff in Italy, along with other cured meats like mortadella, coppa, pancetta, bresaola, nduja, guanciale, lardo, and so on. The entire cured meat category, including salami, is referred to as salume and if you’ve ever visited the country you’ll probably have experienced the irresistible deliciousness of a pre-meal selection. These can be humungous and, in our book, constitute a meal in its own right, sodium and any nitrates/nitrites be damned! According to the Trust your Taste Project, co-funded by the EU, in 2021 Italians gobbled up 17kg of cured meats per person.
There are a bazillion types of salami in Italy, some still made using traditional fermentation and dry-curing in natural animal casings. From the donkey meat salami of Vicenza, to the fennel-scented finocchiona of Tuscany and the ball-shaped pitina of Pordenone in Friuli-Venezia Giulia (made from lean meat like deer and rolled in polenta to help preserve it), Italian salami is highly regional and varied. Depending on who you ask (and believe!), there are likely over 300 main types, with some sources claiming there are ‘possibly thousands’, while others don’t even try to put a number on it and just say, ‘there are many’.
Which brings us to this salad. It’s fair to say you probably wouldn’t be popping an artisanal-quality Italian salami into the oven for this; that would be sacrilege. With sweet, complex flavours and that melting, lard-ified texture, it wouldn’t make sense. But a less rarified salami; of the type you’d buy from the supermarket? Shove it in and let it turn to crunch! Salami cooked this way is crazy-good; it becomes rather salty with the concentrating of the flavours, and this, along with the crunch-factor, works particularly well with everything else here. It’s a salad that doesn’t take much effort to make, with a simple oil and vinegar dressing and the salami the only ingredient that needs anything done beyond a chop or a tear. Slightly thinner-cut salami will crisp better than thicker slices, but you don’t want it paper thin or it will just cook away to nothing.
SERVES 4
180g thinly-sliced salami
1 small bunch curly endive
Handful baby spinach leaves
200g bocconcini, drained and torn into chunks
1 x 340g jar pickled artichokes, drained and halved
160g (1 cup) green olives
extra virgin olive oil
balsamic vinegar
Preheat the oven to 180˚C, fan-forced. Place the salami slices on a large baking tray in a single layer, then bake for 12-15 minutes or until golden and crisp. Remove to a large wire rack, placing them in a single layer, to cool. (You can also cool the salami on a kitchen paper-lined tray to absorb the excess fat, if you prefer).
Tear off the endive leaves, wash, then spin dry. Combine in a large bowl with the spinach, bocconcini, artichokes, olives and salami, and gently toss to combine. Drizzle generously with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then transfer to a large bowl or a platter to serve. Serve immediately.
