AI photoEgg-Free Green Sauce (Salsa Verde)
A bright green sauce made without eggs, blending parsley, anchovies, tuna and rice for a tangy finish.
Labels are worked out automatically from the ingredients and can be wrong. Check the packaging if it matters to you.
Ingredients
Steps
Put the washed and dried parsley, garlic clove, anchovies, tuna, cooked rice, white vinegar, chilli pepper, salt and olive oil into a blender jug.
Blend everything until smooth.
Season with more salt if needed.
Serve with boiled meat.
This is salsa verde without the egg yolk that most Italian versions lean on for body — and that's the whole trick of this recipe. Classic salsa verde thickens the way mayonnaise does: egg yolk holds oil and vinegar together. Take the egg away and you need another thickener, something with starch or protein that can do the same job of grabbing fat and acid and refusing to let them separate. Here that's cooked rice. It's not a flavour ingredient, it's scaffolding — the starch swells slightly in the blender and gives the sauce a cling, so it sits on sliced beef instead of running off the plate.
The anchovy and tuna aren't "a bit of extra protein" either — they're there because parsley on its own tastes green and thin, and salt alone tastes sharp and flat. Fish brings glutamates, the same backstage flavour-deepening effect you get from Parmesan or soy sauce, without adding its own fishy presence once it's blended into a leaf-heavy sauce. Some say salsa verde has to have egg or it isn't really salsa verde — no, because the name just means green sauce, and what makes it green and alive is parsley, acid, and oil in the right balance. The egg was never the point. It was a convenient thickener for people who had hens and didn't have blenders.
Whether this works comes down to one thing: does the sauce hold, or does it split into a puddle of oil over green grit? That's decided in the blender, not after. Run it until it's genuinely smooth — not flecked, not grainy — because every half-blended bit of parsley is a place for the oil to pool and separate later on the plate.
Go through what's actually doing work here, because none of the nine ingredients are just padding.
Parsley is the base and the only thing giving you 50g of it — flat-leaf if you can get it, curly if that's what's in the shop, it blends the same either way once it's chopped fine by the blade. Wash it properly and dry it well; wet parsley dilutes the sauce and you end up adding more oil to compensate, which throws off the balance you were trying to hit. No parsley-specific substitute exists that keeps this recipe's identity — this is what makes salsa verde green, so don't swap it for basil unless you want pesto's cousin, not this.
Anchovies and tuna are the savoury backbone, and between the two, don't skip the anchovy even if you think you dislike anchovies — three small fillets blended into a whole sauce disappear as "fishiness" and reappear as depth, the same way a splash of fish sauce vanishes into a stir-fry. If you genuinely can't have fish, you're not making this sauce, you're making a different green sauce — capers and a few extra olives can push some salt and brine in that direction, but don't call it the same thing to yourself.
Cooked rice is the quiet hero and the reason this recipe exists without egg. Any plain cooked rice works — leftover from last night's dinner is ideal, this is a good use for it. If you have none, a slice of stale bread soaked in a little vinegar is the traditional stand-in elsewhere in Mediterranean cooking and would do the same structural job: starch and a bit of bound liquid to thicken.
Chilli and salt you adjust by taste, which is the right instruction here, not a cop-out — a blender sauce changes as it rests, so taste again after a few minutes, not just straight off the blade.
Olive oil should have some character but not shout over the parsley — "to taste" means you're building body, not following a measurement, so add it gradually and stop when the sauce coats a spoon and holds rather than runs.
White vinegar at 20g is the acid that keeps this sauce sharp rather than oily and flat — if you only have wine vinegar or lemon juice, either works, since the job is acidity, not a particular vinegar's pedigree.
Garlic, one clove, raw and blended in — mellow it by crushing with a little salt first if you want a rounder edge rather than a raw bite.
Patience here isn't about long cooking, there is none, it's about not rushing the blend and not serving it the second it's made — let it sit ten minutes if you can, so the garlic and chilli settle into the oil instead of sitting raw on top of it. Fridge in a sealed jar, a few days, and it only gets better as the flavours marry — treat it the way you'd treat a good chutney, not a delicate thing that must be eaten today.
·