Pear and dry Valais meat salad with miso-honey dressing

Salads… I haven’t fallen in love with them at first sight. I actually couldn’t understand people who devoured them lunch after lunch during my London days… It took me a while to fall in love with them. But then I realised why. It is all about the interplay between varying textures. It is a delicate balance that one needs to strike in order to create a perfect salad that can quickly go terribly wrong if you don’t pair your ingredients carefully.

However, when you combine together bitter red endives with buttery avocado and contrast it with sweet pears wrapped in a salty, raw meat, finally coating it all with a honey-miso dressing, you get complex, yet complementing each other flavours.

In this recipe, I used the traditional dry Valais meat. It is similar to prosciutto and Parma ham, yet it is made from beef rather than pork. The beef is generously salted and then let to dry out in the fresh air of the Alps, without being cured or smoked. Its thin slices reminisce of purple ribbons that together with fresh herbs, each uniquely used in the preparation depending on the person making them, contribute to its distinct aroma.

Pear and dry Valais meat salad with miso-honey dressing

Recipe by monika.gemmetCourse: LunchDifficulty: Easy

Servings

2

servings

Prep time

20

minutes

Cooking timeminutes

This salad is a perfect lunch idea for the moody April days, when the spring is shyly approaching, whereas the winter hasn’t given up as of yet, as we have seen with snow flakes still falling down.

Ingredients

• 2 pears

• 4-5 slices of Valais dry meat, halved

• 2 red endives

• 3 kale leaves, stems removed, cut into bite-size pieces

• 1 avocado, cubed

• 30g hard cheese (I used mountain cheese with chives, called Mutschli), cut into cubes

• handful of hazelnuts

• 2-3 sprigs of fresh thyme

• Dressing

• 3 tablespoons olive oil

• 1 teaspoon white miso paste

• 1 teaspoon honey

• 2 teaspoons lime juice

• pinch of salt and pepper, to taste

Directions

• Cut the pears into quarters, then halve each piece.
• Taking one pear slice and half a slice of the dry meat at a time, wrap the meat around the pear slice. Repeat until you wrap around all the pear pieces.
• Instead of chopping, tear off the endive leaves, leaving them whole so that they resemble little salad boats.
• Put a few endive and kale leaves on a plate and add in between the pear slices wrapped with dry meat.
• Add the avocado cubes to the plate.
• Using a vegetable peeler, shave the cheese into thin, long slices and place these between pears.
• To finish, sprinkle over the hazelnuts and thyme.
• To make the dressing, whisk in all the ingredients and with dot the dressing with a teaspoon all over the salad.

Notes

• If you can’t find the Valais dry meat, you can use the Prosciutto Crudo or Serrano Ham.
• In case you have trouble dissolving the miso paste in the dressing, you can mix the miso paste with a teaspoon of water in order to make it more fluid.
• Instead of plating each salad portions, you can also mix all the ingredients in a bowl and coat them with the dressing. In this case, I recommend cutting the endive leaves into bite-size pieces.
• The dressing is really versatile, you can use it in other salads – I tested it with potato and all green salads and it worked perfectly.