Matjes salad with beetroot

Ingredients for 4 servings:

• 750 g beetroot
• 4 herring fillets (double fillets)
• 2 large apples, sour
• 1 large onion(s), but not a vegetable onion, that would be too big
• 150 g gherkins
• 3 tbsp sour cream
• 2 tbsp mayonnaise
• Salt
• pepper
• some cucumber juice

Instructions

Working time approx. 30 minutes; Rest time approx. 2 hours; Total time approx. 2 hours 30 minutes

Cook the beets in lightly salted water until tender. If necessary, you can also use pre-cooked beets from the refrigerated section. Let the beets cool, peel, and cut into small cubes. Peel the onion and apple, and finely dice both, as well as the gherkins. Add everything to the beetroot cubes. Pour in some of the pickle juice from the gherkins and mix well. Don’t use too much, as you don’t want the salad to become mushy. Now cut the herring into bite-sized pieces and mix in. Whisk the mayonnaise and sour cream with a little pickle juice until smooth, season with salt (carefully, the herring already has plenty of salt) and pepper, and fold into the remaining ingredients. Refrigerate the salad and let it marinate for at least 2 hours. The longer the salad marinates, the better it will be. Stir well again, season to taste, and serve. Please don’t use herring “Matjes-style in oil” or anything similar—it doesn’t taste very good. The salad tastes best with mild Dutch matjes. You can get them year-round from fishmongers, for example, at the weekly market. As an alternative to matjes, you can also use Bismarck herring or rollmops—but then, of course, it’s no longer a matjes salad.