No-cook salad with tomatoes, chickpeas and rose harissa

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This simple tomato and chickpea salad from Meera Sodha is fast food at its finest. As Meera notes below, it's worth sourcing good chickpeas for this if you can, or using ones you've cooked from dried. Extracted from Dinner by Meera Sodha (Fig Tree, £27), Photography by David Loftus.

First published in 2025

Meera says: 'The perfect assembly job. For when it’s too hot to cook but you still want to eat something delicious. Pre-cooked jarred chickpeas are fantastic for salads, because they are ludicrously creamy. If you have only tinned, use two tins and to get rid of any chalkiness, put the chickpeas and their water into a saucepan, bring to a boil and simmer for 5 minutes, then drain, to get super-soft chickpeas. Belazu makes an incomparable rose harissa. '

Ingredients

Metric

Imperial

Dressing

Salad

Method

1

Put all the dressing ingredients into a bowl and stir

2

Drain the chickpeas, tip into a large bowl, and add the onion, tomatoes, cucumber and olives

3

Pour the dressing over the vegetables and mix well

4

Finely chop the coriander and all but a small handful of mint leaves. Sprinkle over the chopped coriander and mint, and fold through the salad

5

To serve, toast the pitta breads or heat the flatbreads and cut into pieces

  • pitta bread, or flatbreads, to serve
6

Tip the salad out onto a serving platter, scatter over the remaining mint leaves and serve with the bread on the side

Meera Sodha is a cook and a food writer, renowned for her Asian-inspired, meat-free recipes. She writes the Guardian’s weekly ‘The New Vegan’ column, and is the author of three best-selling cookbooks: Made in India, Fresh India and East. She cooks, writes and lives in London with her husband and daughters.

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