Delia Smith’s rice salad mixes nutty brown basmati, dressed in vinaigrette while it’s warm, with red apple, walnuts, currants, cucumber, tomatoes, pepper and spring onions once the rice is cold. Allow about 2 hours, an hour of it just for cooling, and you’ll have enough for 4 to 6.
Delia makes the same salad at the end of her rice lesson on YouTube, posted by Delia Online in 2020. The video adds one touch the book leaves out, a last scatter of chopped walnuts over the top, and she suggests it with cold cuts or for a buffet.
Her Complete Cookery Course also suggests it beside the chicken salad with tarragon and grapes, as a side for lunch on a warm summer day. Every spoonful gives you soft, nutty grains with sweet little currants, crisp apple and the crunch of walnut.
Delia Smith’s Brown Rice Salad
Course: SaladsCuisine: BritishDifficulty: Easy4
servings1
hour20
minutes40
minutes425
kcalLong-grain brown basmati dressed warm in Delia’s own vinaigrette, from her Complete Cookery Course (1992), page 446. The ingredients give 4 to 6 people a rice salad with apple, walnuts and currants through every mouthful.
Ingredients
- For the salad:
275ml (10fl oz) long-grain brown rice, preferably basmati, measured in a jug
570ml (1 pint) boiling water
1 dessertspoon olive oil
3 spring onions, very finely chopped
5cm (2in) piece unpeeled cucumber, finely chopped
2 large tomatoes, peeled and finely chopped
½ red or green pepper, deseeded and finely chopped
1 red dessert apple, cored and chopped, skin left on
25g (1oz) currants
25g (1oz) walnuts, finely chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper
- For the vinaigrette (you’ll use 3 to 4 tablespoons):
1 level teaspoon salt, ideally crushed rock salt
½ to 1 clove garlic, peeled
1 rounded teaspoon mustard powder
1 tablespoon wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar
freshly ground black pepper
6 tablespoons olive oil
Directions
- Vinaigrette: Crush the salt to a fine powder in a pestle and mortar, then pound in the garlic until you have a paste. Mix in the mustard powder, vinegar and some pepper until the salt dissolves, stir in the olive oil, then tip it all into a screw-top jar.
- Coat: Heat the dessertspoon of olive oil in a saucepan, add the rice and stir until every grain is coated.
- Simmer: Add a little salt, pour in the boiling water and bring it back to the boil. Stir once only, cover with the lid and simmer gently for 40 minutes, until the water has all been absorbed, tilting the pan to check.
- Dress: Tip the rice into a salad bowl and fluff it up with a fork. Shake the jar hard and pour 3 to 4 tablespoons of the vinaigrette over the rice while it’s warm.
- Cool: Spread the rice out in the bowl and leave it until completely cold, about 1 hour.
- Mix: Stir in the spring onions, cucumber, tomatoes, pepper, apple, currants and walnuts, adding a little more vinaigrette if it seems dry. Taste for salt and pepper, then keep it in the fridge until you serve it.
Notes
- To peel the tomatoes, cover them with boiling water for exactly a minute, then slip off the skins.
- The vinaigrette makes about twice what the salad needs, so keep the rest in the jar for a green salad the next day, but no longer.
- Cooked rice needs care: cool it within about an hour, keep the salad in the fridge and eat it within a day, as the Food Standards Agency advises.
FAQs
Which rice works best?
Long-grain brown basmati. Delia’s Complete Cookery Course says brown basmati has the best flavour of all, and the 1992 edition named basmati for this salad, where the 1983 one asked only for brown rice.
White rice works too, and her headnote says it then needs just 15 minutes instead of 40. Whichever you use, measure it by volume in a jug, since the water is always double the rice.
How do I keep the grains from going sticky?
Stir the rice once, when the water goes in, and then leave it alone. In her rice lesson Delia explains that stirring while it cooks breaks the grains, and the starch they let out is what makes rice sticky.
She also uses a wide, shallow pan with a well-fitting lid, so the rice cooks in an even layer. Her video gives brown rice 40 to 45 minutes, so if there’s still water at 40, put the lid back on for 5 more.
Can I make it with a herb vinaigrette?
Yes, and Delia pairs it that way herself. In the Complete Cookery Course she serves a brown rice salad with a herb vinaigrette alongside mixed vegetables à la grecque, which she calls her number one vegetarian dish, for lunch.
Her herb version stirs a teaspoon each of chopped herbs into the dressing, such as chives, tarragon, parsley, basil, chervil or mint. Make it just before you dress the rice, as she likes her dressings as fresh as possible.
Can I take it on a picnic?
Yes, Delia’s picnic chapter names rice or potato salad as the handy ones to take, because both are dressed before you leave, and the only potato salad in that book is the Delia Smith new potato salad with mint and chives. She asks for a polythene box with a tight-fitting lid, and in the 1983 edition she packed it in individual foil containers with lids.
Keep it in a cool bag with an ice pack until you eat, which is my own advice for any cooked rice. I’d also pack the walnuts separately and add them at the picnic so they stay crunchy.
Which other rice salads has Delia written?
Quite a few, and four of them have their own pages on this site: a pesto rice salad, a Camargue red rice salad with feta, a brown and wild rice salad with dried cranberries and a spiced brown rice salad for Christmas. The closest is the brown rice and tuna fish salad on the very next page of the Complete Cookery Course, served on lettuce with lemon and cayenne.
That book also has an aduki bean and brown rice salad and a green herb and rice salad. This one is the plainest of them all, with no cheese, pesto or spice, just fruit, nuts and crisp vegetables.
