Living in Spain means I get to grow a veggie garden with supreme ease.
It just grows itself and all I have to do is make sure I give the plants water! And of course, along with a veggie garden comes a whole ton of extra vegetables.
Which is pretty cool if you live a vegan lifestyle and enjoy a good gazpacho in the summer!
So making this pepper salad is pretty easy for me because I can just go out to the garden and grab a handful of peppers.
Bear in mind that they shrink a lot in cooking, so you’ll need a lot of peppers, depending on their size. This year my peppers were much smaller than usual so for today’s bowlful of pepper salad I used 8 peppers (double what’s shown in the image).
Traditionally, this Spanish roast pepper salad, or Ensalada de Pimiento, is dressed with olive oil but it’s one of the easiest recipes to adapt to an oil-free vegan diet.
The best type of pepper to use for roasting is the fat bell pepper. You can make this salad with green peppers, red peppers or a mix of both.
I like this best with a mix of red and green but if I had to choose between them I’d go for red because they’re sweeter.
On this occasion, I made it with mainly green peppers because I had soo many of them dripping off the plants I thought I’d better use some of them up!
How to Prepare the Peppers & Onion for this Roasted Pepper Salad Recipe
Wash the peppers and place them, along with 1 whole onion into a baking tray and cover the baking tray with silver foil.
Place into the oven at 200ºc and leave the peppers to roast for about 30 minutes, then carefully turn them over to roast on the other side.
Keep a check on the peppers and when they’re lightly browned on both sides, turn off the oven but leave the baking tray in the oven, with the silver foil covering left intact.
I like to leave the peppers to cool down in the oven under the foil because they mature and gain more flavour, but if you’re in a hurry, you could take them out and remove the foil to help them cool down faster.
When the peppers have cooled, remove the foil and take the pepper and remove the stalk from the top.
Next, peel off the thin outer skin from the pepper and slice the flesh into a bowl, holding the pepper over the bowl as you chop so as to catch all the juices that come out of the pepper.
When you get to the top of the pepper, discard the little lump of seeds from the centre, and slice the rest of the pepper into the bowl.
Peel the onion and slice it into slices of the size to suit your preference and add to the bowl. Sprinkle the whole lot with a generous pinch of salt. Taste and add more as necessary as this salad really gets flavoursome with extra salt.
Add a dash of white wine vinegar and the juice from half a lime.
Place the peppers and whole onion (in its skin) into a baking tray and cover with silver foil.
Bake in the oven at 200ºc for about 30 minutes.
Turn the peppers over and return to the oven until browned on both sides.
Turn off the oven and leave the peppers under the foil to cool.
Hold each pepper and twist off the stem, then slice the flesh, holding it over the salad bowl to catch all the juice.
When you reach the top of the pepper, pop out the seeds and discard.
Peel the onion and slice it into the desired size slices and add to the bowl of pepper salad.
Add a good pinch of salt, taste the pepper and add more until it reaches just the right point.
Pour on a dash of white wine vinegar and the juice from half a lime juice.
Notes
For the traditional version of this recipe, just use olive oil instead of lime juice.
Alternative Ingredients for this Spanish Roasted Pepper Salad Recipe
If like me, you like to eat this as a main event for your lunch, you can add extra ingredients to raise the nutritional profile of the salad.
After you’ve made the basic roasted pepper salad, simply add the extra ingredients. I added some raw slithers of red pepper for additional colour and some large white beans.
Not only do the beans taste delicious in the pepper salad but they also give it a healthy protein boost.
I hope you enjoyed this Spanish roasted pepper salad, brought to you from Malaga, Spain!
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