Simple Greek Sliced Tomato Salad (Domatosalata)

Domatosalata strips the full Greek salad down to a single ingredient and asks it to carry the whole dish alone: sliced tomatoes, good olive oil, dried oregano and salt, nothing else. It exists because a genuinely excellent, sun-ripened tomato does not need cucumber, onion or feta standing beside it, and sometimes adding them would be a distraction rather than an improvement.

This is a dish that lives or dies entirely on the quality of one ingredient, and it is honestly not worth making with anything less than a properly ripe, in-season tomato, since there is nowhere at all for a bland, underripe one to hide.

It appears constantly on Greek tables in high summer specifically, when tomatoes are at their absolute best and a full horiatiki can start to feel like it is doing too much work.

Key preparation steps

1. Slice properly ripe tomatoes.
2. Arrange on a plate and season with salt.
3. Drizzle generously with good olive oil.
4. Finish with a generous sprinkle of dried oregano.

The tomatoes are the whole dish

Choose the ripest, most fragrant tomatoes you can find, ideally a mix of colours and sizes if you have access to good heirloom varieties, since this dish has nowhere for a bland or underripe tomato to hide. Slice into rounds or wedges, whichever suits the size and shape of the fruit.

Dressing simply

Arrange the sliced tomatoes on a plate, season with a generous pinch of salt, which draws out some of the tomato's own juices and concentrates its flavour, then drizzle generously with good olive oil, letting it pool slightly around the slices rather than being sparing.

The oregano finish

Sprinkle over a generous amount of dried oregano, more than might feel necessary, since this simple herb is doing real work standing in for the other ingredients a full horiatiki would normally carry. Serve immediately or let it sit for ten minutes, which lets the salt draw out a little more of the tomato's juice to mingle with the oil.

What matters in this dish