Shopska Salad: The Bulgarian Salad with Grated Sirene
The Bulgarian flag has three stripes: white, green and red. On the plate that's sirene, cucumber and tomato, and that is no accident - the people who put the salad together in the 1950s picked those colors on purpose.
Shopska salad (Bulgarian: Шопска салата) is a cold salad of Bulgarian cuisine made from finely diced tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and onion, covered with a layer of grated salty sirene cheese, dressed with oil and now and then a drop of vinegar. The parsley on top is decoration, an olive or a chili pepper is a bonus. And that flag is the most honest thing about the whole story, because almost everything else people tell you about this salad is invented.
A Name from the Mountains, Where Tomatoes Never Grew
The salad is named after the Shopi, the highlanders of Shopluk, the region straddling the borders of Bulgaria, Serbia and North Macedonia. Anyone hunting for the salad's origins in their cooking will hunt in vain: Shopluk is mountainous country living on beans, potatoes and milk, where tomatoes and cucumbers were never grown on any scale. The name is a label: it was meant to sound folksy and Bulgarian, and it did the job.
Where it's eaten, though, reaches far beyond Shopluk. It started out Bulgarian and today it is shared - it sits on menus under the same name in Serbia and in North Macedonia, and the Serbs keep a cheeseless version right alongside it as srpska salata. Macedonian makedonska salata is a different dish altogether, made from roasted peppers and tomatoes; Greek horiatiki cuts the vegetables coarsely and leaves the feta in one piece, while Turkish çoban salatası looks almost the same, only it has no cheese and nobody knows who inspired whom. The most distant cousin sits in Israel: katzutz is the same diced vegetables, which nobody there tops with cheese either. Who owns the salad is argued over in the Balkans as fiercely as who owns ajvar. Bulgaria has at least one advantage: it knows the cook's name.
A 1956 Cookbook and a Salad Without Cheese
That cook was named Petar Doychev, and he cooked for the state. Shopska salad was put together in the mid-1950s by the chefs of the state enterprise Balkantourist at the Chernomorets Restaurant in the Druzhba resort near Varna - as a dish for tourists, one that was meant to show them Bulgaria on a plate. The first printed recipe, in a 1956 booklet for housewives, looked nothing like today's version: it had no cheese. Grated sirene did not become a must until the early 1970s, when the salad settled in as a national symbol, and ever since, every tourist has learned to recognize it before their first word of Bulgarian. Bulgarian sources themselves do not pin the year down for certain - the dates they give range from 1954 to 1956.
What Is Under the Sirene and How to Spot a Real Shopska Salad
The cheese is the star. Sirene is a white cheese ripened in brine, crumbly and salty enough that the salad needs no salt of its own. A real shopska salad has it grated, in an unbroken layer that hides the vegetables completely. One comparison does the job here: the block of "Balkan cheese" from the supermarket back home in Czechia is the same animal, only tamed; Bulgarian sirene is saltier and shreds into snow under the grater. Underneath lie tomatoes, which in Bulgaria ripen in the sun and carry most of the flavor, cucumber for coolness and pepper for crunch, and it has to be raw.
People order it everywhere and with everything. In Bulgaria it opens the meal: it lands on the table first, before the grilled meat, the pljeskavica or the fish arrive, and in summer it is lunch in its own right for plenty of people. If you want the real thing, look for two things: raw vegetables diced fine and cheese grated, not cut - the moment cubes of cheese or leaves of iceberg lettuce turn up, run.
A Plate with a View in Balchik
In Bulgaria I ordered shopska salad as a healthy side with pretty much every meal, and it was excellent everywhere. The one at Rhomphaia Restaurant in the seaside town of Balchik cost 7.80 BGN (4 EUR) and arrived on a terrace overlooking the Black Sea. There is not much to say about it - the sirene was salty and crumbly, the tomatoes sweet and overripe exactly the way they should be at the end of an Indian summer, the cucumber underneath cold. Balkantourist dreamed it up seventy years ago for tourists by the sea, to show them Bulgaria. I was sitting by the sea, I was a tourist, and I saw it. The plan worked.
