Yes, I know, the combination of nuts, blue cheese and fruit like apples or pears is a classic and you probably don't need instructions to put it together into something as simple as a salad.
But why do I still want to recommend this recipe to you? On the one hand, this is because we have recently started offering the fantastic Erborinato do San Carlo, the original Gorgonzola, so to speak, a wonderfully creamy blue cheese made from raw cow's milk from Piedmont, which has an almost voluptuous sweetness that makes it so special and whose spicy scent has already caught my attention during the meal Shooting the recipe pictures beguiled.
Of course, our wonderful Grenoble walnuts go extremely well with this fine blue mold and so two ingredients were already decided for the new recipe of the week.
Last but not least, as luck would have it, the little fruit and vegetable shop on our street corner has the most wonderful pears - with the beautiful name Santa Maria - that I just can't walk past without buying at least one.
Most of the time I just bite into it without thinking about it, but today I thought it was time for Santa Maria and San Carlo to get to know each other... I was probably just in the mood for a culinary romance, seasoned with a pinch of allspice d'Espelette, as red as love, and mixed with crunchy walnuts, which add a lot of bite and ensure that the story doesn't get too cheesy.
Ingredients for 4 persons):
- 4 tbsp walnut oil
- 3 tbsp Martin Pouret vinegar
- Salt
- Piment d'Espelette
- a beautiful piece of Erborinato do San Carlo
- 2 chicory
- 1 Treviso radicchio
- 1 crisp, slightly sour pear
- Walnuts – about 2 per person
Preparation:
- Mix oil, vinegar, salt and allspice to make a dressing.
- Wash the chicory, radicchio and pear, quarter them lengthwise and then cut into long, narrow strips. The original recipe suggests a vegetable slicer for this, but I didn't have anything like that on hand. A large, sharp knife will do the trick too.
- Arrange everything on a plate or mix together in a salad bowl.
- Pour the dressing over it.
- Cut the Erborinato into cubes or tear it apart with your fingers and add it over the salad.
- Finally, crack the nuts and sprinkle them over the salad.
- Voilà, c'est ça. Bon appetite!
The conclusion:
The crisp, sweet, fresh pear complements and balances the bitterness of chicory and radicchio without silencing them. The walnut vinaigrette with the wonderfully winey-sour Banyuls vinegar with light raspberry notes acts as the perfect base for the whole thing: both flavors only emerge subtly, giving the salad the spotlight and allowing its aromas to shine.
But the absolute highlight is really the Erborinato. Unlike, for example, the quite salty Roquefort, which would of course also have been suitable here, the Erborinato brings its own wonderful sweetness, which was already mentioned. And that goes perfectly with the pear.
The original recipe comes from Orathay Souksisavanh and Vania Nikolcic and was published by Hädecke Verlag in 2011. I found it on Valentina's cookbook .
