Mimosa Salad with Sardines: Classic Layered Recipe
Who can name the three main salads of the Soviet era without thinking? Among the few answers you'll hear, I bet most will be herring under a fur coat, Olivier and Mimosa salad. These salads are the backbone of any home celebration, even if they don't always appear on the same table. As a rule, they're hearty, very tasty appetizers that get eaten down to the last bite.
Layered Mimosa is the most festive and most popular canned fish salad. It's built on canned fish, vegetables, eggs and mayonnaise. There are lots of versions, usually overcomplicated with various and not always fitting ingredients. Many people make it with cheese. To my taste, butter doesn't belong in this salad: it adds calories without changing the flavor. Nor does onion.
The bright yellow salad looks like a delicate sprig of mimosa blossom. Egg yolk is used on top to get the right color and pattern. Most of the ingredients are mild or neutral in flavor, so traditionally the salad gets a generous coat of mayonnaise, and a tart apple goes in too.
For a pretty presentation, you can make a mold in a minute from an ordinary plastic mineral water bottle. Just carefully cut out a cylinder of the right height.
People love this salad, and making it is often a creative process. You can simply layer it in a clear glass dish, or use a ring mold, a heart-shaped mold and so on. Generally speaking, the order of the layers doesn't matter much. That said, it's customary, and right, for the fish and vegetables to sit next to each other. Don't spread mayonnaise on every layer, or the salad will slump. It's enough to coat the potato layer in the middle. And one more thing: it's very important to let the salad chill well and soak up the flavors.
Ingredients
2 servings
- Canned fish (sardines or saury in oil) 1 can
- Apple 2
- Eggs 4
- Potatoes 2
- Carrots 2
- Mayonnaise 0.5 cup
Step-by-step recipe
- Let me say right away: I don't use onion or butter to make Mimosa salad. In my view, they're unnecessary. Onion just doesn't go well with the other ingredients, I think, and it's too sharp for such a delicate salad. All the tricks cooks suggest, boiling it, scalding it, pickling it, only spoil the result.
- Butter, first, adds too many calories to the salad, which isn't great; you might as well butter some bread. Second, where have you seen good butter lately? As far as I'm concerned, mayonnaise is plenty.
- The salad is layered, so you could even call it a cake.
- Boiling the vegetables and eggs
- Get all the ingredients ready. Boil the potatoes and carrots until fully cooked. Hard-boil the eggs and cool them right away under running water; that way they peel more easily. Take the sardines out of the can along with the liquid and mash them with a fork until smooth. Peel and core the apple.
- Coarsely grate the potatoes, carrots and apple. Put each on its own plate. That makes layering the salad easier.
- Separate the egg whites from the yolks. Coarsely grate the whites, and mash the yolks with a fork until very fine, or grate them finely.
- How to layer Mimosa salad
- You need a deep plate or a serving dish. You can also build Mimosa salad as a tower using a ring mold cut from a plastic bottle. Spread the grated apple over the bottom of the dish or mold. Level it so the apple covers the bottom completely.
- Put the sardines on top of the apple. Spread the sardine layer with mayonnaise, just a little, 1 tbsp is enough. Ideally, all the layers should be the same thickness. Press them down lightly.
- Add the grated potatoes. Level them so the potato layer completely covers the layers below without forming a dome. Spread the potatoes with 1 tbsp mayonnaise.
- Next, spread the grated carrots. This is the darkest layer, and it sets off the pale eggs, potatoes, apples and whites.
- Then comes the egg white layer. Spread it generously with mayonnaise, carefully, without missing any spots.
- Sprinkle the mayonnaise generously with the finely grated egg yolk.
- And that's not all. I wasn't sure whether the salad needed a garnish. I thought for a long time: with what? I decided green looks nice on yellow. I sliced a few green onion stalks and sprinkled them over the Mimosa. Let the salad chill in the fridge; it's served cold.
- And finally: don't add any more mayonnaise. The salad would slump and be too greasy. The juice from the sardine can gives it a unique juiciness, and since there's nothing sharp in the dish (like onion), this delicate salad will melt in your mouth.
| Serves: | 2 servings |
| Calories: | 179 |
| Prep: | 15 mins |
| Cook: | 45 mins |
| Total: | 1 h |
| Category: | Salads |
| Cuisine: | European |
| Rating: |
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4.5
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