Shopska salad
Shopska salad is a cold salad popular throughout Southeastern Europe. It is Bulgaria's most famous salad and national dish.
Ingredients and serving
The dish is made from tomatoes, cucumbers, onion/scallions, raw or roasted peppers, and sirene, a white brined cheese similar to feta, but much milder in taste. The vegetables are usually diced and salted, followed by a light dressing of sunflower oil, which is occasionally complemented by vinegar. The addition of vinegar contributes, however, to the sour flavour that the tomatoes impart. In restaurants, the dressings are provided separately. Finally, the vegetables are covered in a thick layer of grated or diced sirene cheese. This salad is often consumed as an appetizer with rakia.According to food anthropologist Rayna Gavrilova, the dish is commonly accompanied by a shot of apricot or other fruit brandy.
Background and history
Tomatoes appeared in Southeastern Europe in the mid-1800s.In the post-war socialist era, Balkantourist focused on marketing Bulgaria's Black Sea coast as a tourist destination for Bulgarians and for western tourists as a way of showcasing the socialist "good life". This included reinventing and remarketing regional dishes to identify them as Bulgarian rather than simply Eastern European. The Shopska salad is a variation on a Greek salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, and feta; Balkantourist in 1956 named their version Shopska salad. The salad's colors, which mimic those of the Bulgarian flag, were coincidences which were seen as a positive for evoking national sentiment.
Despite the fact that the salad's name comes from the westernmost Bulgarian region called Shopluk, it first appeared at the Black Sea coast, in a resort near Varna, called Druzhba in the restaurant "Chernomorets". It can be found in one of the first state-approved cookbooks from 1956. The development and popularization of the salad is attributed to a leader in Bulgarian tourism . According to Doychev, the Shopska salad was a continuation of the "Harvest salad", developed earlier by "Balkantourist".
The dish was initially served in Bulgaria only in the hotels of Balkantourist. It is the only survivor of five or six recipes similarly created for and marketed by the tourism industry. It became an emblem of Bulgarian tourism. It was approved as a national culinary symbol during the 1970s and 1980s. In 2014 Shopska salad was Bulgaria's most recognizable dish in Europe. It was the most popular recipe in a European Parliament initiative called A Taste of Europe. In 2025, CNN ranked Shopska salad among the 24 best salads in the world.