Park Street Deli Taboule Salad

In my early years as a journalist, I wrote a piece about people at my community’s Islamic center observing the holiday of Ramadan. I was invited to observe evening prayers and then share in a meal called an iftar. That meal was served potluck-style, with families all bringing different foods to contribute. It was a memorable occasion for me. I got to sample and enjoy a variety of traditional Mediterranean and Middle Eastern foods including stuffed grape leaves, hummus, and tabbouleh salad.

Years later, my kids attended school with the children of a family who runs a local Mediterranean restaurant, and I became friends with the family. During a small playdate gathering of moms and kids one day, we were surprised with homemade treats including baklava and tabbouleh.

Tabbouleh, or sometimes it’s spelled taboule or tabouli, is an herb salad consisting primarily of parsley, tomatoes, onion, wheat (bulgur), lemon juice, olive oil, and salt. The parsley is the star of this dish, while the wheat and other ingredients accent the salad. It’s a nice refreshing, low-carb dish.

If you want to try tabbouleh, Aldi sells a taboule salad featuring parsley, fresh tomatoes, onions, and lemon juice. It’s been a while since I’ve had taboule, so I thought it would be fun to pick up the Aldi version and see how it compares to what I’ve eaten in the past.

Park Street Deli Taboule Salad is a Regular Buy, so you should be able to find it all year at Aldi. It’s stocked in the refrigerated aisle near the other prepared salads and dips, deli meats, and cheese. It’s sold in a mixed case that also contains chickpea salad and black bean salad. This should be kept refrigerated and is sold ready to eat. The container I purchased had a sell-by date of about two weeks out from my date of purchase.

This cost $2.99 for a 7-ounce container at my local store at the time of writing. That’s about 43 cents per ounce.

If you’re looking out for allergens, this contains wheat.

Other ingredients are fresh tomatoes, parsley, sunflower oil, olive oil, bulgur (cracked wheat), onions, lemon juice, sea salt, citric acid, black pepper, allspice, and 1/10th of 1% of sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (to preserve freshness).

Each container has two 1/2-cup servings. One half-cup serving has 170 calories, 13 grams of total fat (16% DV), 1.5 grams of saturated fat (7% DV), 450 mg of sodium (20% DV), 13 grams of total carbohydrates (5% DV), 3 grams of dietary fiber (10% DV), 2 grams of total sugars, no added sugars, and 2 grams of protein.

This is good. It’s not oversalted but does seem a bit on the salty side, and it’s perhaps a bit saltier than I remember taboule being, but it’s also been a while since I’ve had taboule. The parsley is the standout here, although I think I’ve had other taboule salads that had a higher ratio of parsley. The parsley in this salad is nicely complemented by good-sized tomato chunks and small pieces of diced onion, and the bulgur has a mild flavor. I offered this to one of my teenagers who instantly liked it and went back for more, and I also like this salad, so I’ll be buying more of this in the near future.

The Verdict:

Park Street Deli Taboule Salad is a nod to Middle Eastern or Eastern Mediterranean cuisine, and it features parsley, tomatoes, onions, lemon juice, and bulgur (cracked wheat). It’s well seasoned and makes for a good side dish to a meal. We like this and will be adding it to our Aldi shopping list again.