Tunisian Slata Mechouia: Grilled Pepper and Tomato Salad with Tuna and Capers

Heat a grill, a grill pan or a broiler as hot as it will go. Lay the peppers, chiles, tomatoes, onion halves and unpeeled garlic directly on the grate.

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 4 large sweet red or green peppers
• 2 mild long green chiles (or 1 jalapeno for more heat)
• 4 ripe peak-harvest tomatoes
• 1 small onion, unpeeled and halved
• 4 garlic cloves, unpeeled
• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar or fresh lemon juice
• 1 tsp ground caraway seed
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp fine sea salt, plus more to taste
• 1 can (5 oz / 140 g) good olive-oil-packed tuna, drained and flaked
• 2 hard-boiled eggs, quartered
• 2 tbsp capers, rinsed, and a handful of black olives

Instructions

1. Heat a grill, a grill pan or a broiler as hot as it will go. Lay the peppers, chiles, tomatoes, onion halves and unpeeled garlic directly on the grate.
2. Turn the vegetables every few minutes as they blacken. The chiles and garlic will be done in about 6 minutes, the tomatoes in 8, the peppers in 12 to 15 when the skins are blistered black all over.
3. Pile the peppers and chiles into a bowl and cover tightly for 10 minutes. The trapped steam loosens the skins so they slip off with your fingers.
4. Peel everything: skins and seeds off the peppers and chiles, skins off the tomatoes and onion, garlic squeezed from its papery shell. Do not rinse the vegetables, or you will wash the smoke away.
5. Chop the peeled vegetables together on a board until you have a coarse, rough-textured salad, not a puree. A traditional cook would pound it briefly in a mortar; a board and knife gives you better texture.
6. Transfer to a bowl and fold in the olive oil, vinegar, caraway, coriander and salt. Let it sit for at least 20 minutes so the caraway blooms, then taste and adjust the salt and acid.
7. Spread the salad across a shallow platter, arrange the tuna, egg quarters, capers and olives over the top, and finish with a generous last drizzle of olive oil.
8. Serve at room temperature with warm flatbread for scooping. It keeps in the refrigerator for three days and tastes better on day two.
9. Mechouia simply means grilled in Tunisian Arabic, and the dish is a direct answer to what August does to a Mediterranean garden: too many peppers and too many tomatoes, all ripening at once. Fire is the preservation method here, concentrating the sugars and adding the smoke that makes the salad taste like far more than its handful of ingredients. Caraway is the fingerprint that separates it from its Spanish and Algerian cousins, and Tunisians will tell you the salad is not finished until the oil pooling at the edges of the plate is worth mopping up with bread.

Nutrition (estimated, per serving)

• Calories: 310 kcal
• Protein: 18g
• Fat: 21g
• Carbohydrates: 14g
• Fiber: 4g
• Sugar: 8g
• Sodium: 620mg