Maroulosalata (Greek Lettuce Salad)

So what would be a good dish to follow up the Greek Potato Salad I just made? How about another Greek salad? No, not potato salad again! This Maroulosalata a.k.a. Greek Lettuce Salad. If you’ve followed me for long, you might be wondering why I’m making another lettuce-based Greek salad. Well, I did post my mom’s Greek Salad recipe a while back, but this is a little different. Maroulosalata skips the black olives, tomatoes, red onion, cucumber, oregano, and garlic. You might be asking what’s left? Let me tell you all about it!

This traditional Greek green lettuce salad is simple to make and delicious to consume.

The Ingredients

As I just mentioned, this Maroulosalata recipe uses romaine lettuce as the base much like the Americanized Greek salad I’m used to. Hearts of romaine to be exact. Since the large outer leaves are stripped away, I needed 2 hearts instead of 1 head of romaine. No problem—my usual grocery store sells them in a 3-pack for about $1 more.

The rest of the ingredients were also easy to find. They even had what I consider trued bunches of dill instead of the clamshell packages with only a few sprigs. They even had a sale going on some nice EVOO, so I grabbed a bottle since I was almost out of the generic stuff I usually buy.

The feta in brine wasn’t on sale, but I grabbed a package anyway. It’s so much softer and more flavorful than the dry pre-crumbled stuff. You only need 4 ounces for this recipe, but I have plenty of other recipes with feta cheese to help you use up the rest.

A bunch of scallions and a lemon wrapped up my shopping for this recipe since the only ingredient I had was salt. My refrigerator breakdown a couple of weeks ago still has me building up my cold ingredients ☹️

The Process

One of the things that attracted me to this recipe was it only has 3 steps. I need an easy recipe right now! Plus I wanted a chance to use my new salad spinner. I found one on sale and couldn’t pass it up. I have always wanted one but never thought a salad spinner was a necessity. My lack of storage space probably fed into that.

Well, this recipe changed my mind. It began with rinsing the hearts of romaine and slicing them as thinly as I could. I made sure to sharpen my trusty Santoku knife right before I started so this part was so easy!

Then I popped the freshly sliced but still very wet romaine into the basket, added the lid, and gave it a spin. I was really surprised at how much water came out! And at how green it was… But the lettuce came out much dryer than it went in. Not perfectly dry, but I let it drain a bit more while I prepped the rest of the ingredients and made the salad dressing.

Salad Dressing & Finishing Up

Making the salad dressing was the easiest part of this recipe. I added the extra virgin olive oil, lemon juice, and salt to my mini-prep and pulsed it a few times. It’s the best method I have found to emulsify oil-based dressings.

If you don’t have a mini-prep (or just don’t want to deal with the cleanup), you can always use a sealed container and shake it. I have heard of recycling water and soda bottles for this. I don’t normally have those, but I have used a small Snapware container for salad dressing many times. Whatever you use, the important part is no leaks while shaking LOL!

My Maroulosalata was almost done! Once the dressing was blended, I added the salad ingredients to a large mixing bowl. Then I poured over the salad dressing and began massaging the salad. I’m used to this with kale, but I never knew it worked with romaine too. Massaging also gave me a chance to break up any big chunks of feta cheese.

Timing

As I mentioned, I was looking for a quick and easy recipe, and Maroulosalata was exactly that. It lists 15 minutes total time, and I spent exactly that much time:

• 13 minutes to prep the salad and dressing
• 2 minutes to transfer to a serving bowl
• 15 minutes total

That extra 2 minutes included wiping down the sides of the serving bowl. Transferring it from the mixing bowl got a little messy, and I wanted it to look nice for photos.