Corn Salad With Harissa Spice at Home

If you like your meals nice and piquant, then you’ll love harissa spice. It offers a warm glow to the palette and can bring forth the flavors of even the simplest of cuisine. In this blog, we look at a mouthwatering dish that makes full use of this popular ingredient.

Harissa spice heralds from North Africa with curries and stews benefiting from its use in countries like Libya, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Containing a blend of oil, hot peppers, and a variety of different spices, it offers a flavor base for your cooking to take flight.

So, to the recipe at hand. Let’s get started by covering what’s required to make it.

The Ingredients You’ll Need...

• 1 x Medium-Sized Corn or Tin of Sweetcorn
• 2 x Tablespoons of coriander
• 1 x Spring Onion
• 1 x Tablespoon of harissa spice
• 1 x Tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil
• 1 x Tablespoon of red wine vinegar
• Salt & Pepper

The Best Way to Boil the Corn

While boiling corn sounds like a simple job, there's still a right and a wrong way to do it. When cooking this particular dish, the way you cook your corn will affect the overall taste and consistency, so it’s important to get it right.

To get the best results, we recommend boiling yours in water that’s been seasoned with a little turmeric, salt, and sugar. This will offer a subtle flavor change to the corn, but a mouthwatering one nonetheless, as it will bring out its natural taste. Believe it or not, it actually makes the corn more colorful too!

Before you take the corn off the hob to mix together with your harissa spice and all your other ingredients, you need to make sure that it’s been in long enough. 10 minutes is usually sufficient to get a succulent, yet al dente firmness.

Bringing All Those Tastes Together

The next step in this simple recipe is to mix all of the ingredients we brought together at the beginning. So, after getting a large mixing bowl out, add in the freshly-cooked corn, finely-chopped spring onion, extra virgin olive oil, and red wine vinegar.

What we would suggest when adding your harissa spice is to use it sparingly at first, as it does pack quite a punch. Hotness in food is a subjective thing, so if you’re sharing this food with anyone, you need to adjust the amount you put in accordingly.

One tablespoon of the stuff is usually enough to satisfy even the hottest tastes, but if you’re not sure, add a little, try it and add more if necessary. Ideally speaking, you want to still be able to taste the other gorgeous flavors offered by the other ingredients, so don’t overdo it.

Enjoy as a Snack or With Other Food

Corn salad is tasty enough to be enjoyed as a snack, but it’s something that works equally well as a complement to other food. For instance, you could use it as part of an evening barbecue, with fish or meat, with the flavors of each food complementing each other perfectly.

If eaten as a snack, it's easily enough for 1-2 people, whereas if it’s being eaten alongside other things, the amount that this recipe provides should serve 2-4 adults.

Just One of Many Glorious Global Spices Available

The great thing about harissa spice and the many other global varieties that exist is that they can completely transform any food they’re added to. Relatively simple and easy-to-create recipes like this one can be taken to the next level in terms of taste, adding a completely new dimension to their flavor profile.

So, if reading our blog has gotten your juices flowing and you feel like trying this recipe out for yourself, you can get your hands on the finest harissa spice around by visiting the Little Istanbul shop. There you’ll find a wide range of other international herbs and spices to bring the very best out of your cooking.

We hope that you enjoy this one and you should be sure to watch out for more mouth-watering recipe blogs coming in the near future.