Our old friend and neighbor in Moscow Pavel Teplukhin introduced and prepared this salad to our kitchen.

We have adapted the recipe according to our preferences. The salad is a wonderful summer dish and can make a perfect light lunch.

To make a salad for 4-5 people, you will need:

  • two small lobsters (about 300 grams each),
  • 5 ripe tomatoes,
  • one red onion,
  • a bunch of red basil,
  • a half-bunch of coriander,
  • lemon,
  • olive oil,
  • pepper and salt.

You can use larger lobsters, but in that case, the salad will be less tender.

  • We place lobsters in a large amount of boiling water and boil them for 15 minutes. Then we take the lobsters out and let them cool.
  • In parallel, we peel the skin from tomatoes and cut them into medium-sized pieces. We can the onion into half rings. If the onion “bites”, the sliced ​​half-rings can be scalded with boiling water and left in it for 2 minutes. We squeeze juice from one lemon , add 4 tablespoons of olive oil for the sauce.
  • When the lobsters are cooled we separate their tails from the body, incise the shell on the inside of the tails, carefully remove the tails and cut them into even pieces half a finger wide. One can make a wonderful sauce for pasta from the remaining parts of the lobster.
  • We put cut tomatoes in a salad bowl and sprinkle them with Camargue salt, leave it for a few minutes, then add pieces of lobster and onion, pour over the sauce and mix all ingredients. Then we add red basil and coriander torn by hand (if we are not lazy), sprinkle with pepper from the mill, add a couple of spoons of sauce and mix again. Five minutes later, the salad can and should be eaten! In a few hours, it will lose 50 percent of its taste.

Often, pieces of orange melon are added to the Catalan salad as there are many great melons in Provence – Camargue, Cavaillon (the most expensive), Catalan, Gard each with its own flavor and taste. In our kitchen, not everyone loves melon, so the Catalan salad goes without it.

Being primarily a summer dish, the Catalan salad goes well with a light pale rose from Provence or a white Sauvignon from the Loire Valley or New Zealand.