Miscellaneous Articles
Salad Dressings & Marinades
the sauce of life, or at least proteins and veggies
Speaking of (extra virgin, typically) olive oil and vinegar, a collection of both in a range of in/fused varieties is one of the best shortcuts to instant world class flavors in your cooking, as already mentioned. Oil and vinegar mixes work great as salad dressings, marinades (e.g. for tofu and konjac slices) or as a nice glaze topping your veggie burgers.
If you’re new to the oil and vinegar mix and match game, consider starting with these kinds of combinations:
Chipotle olive oil and chocolate dark balsamic vinegar
Green chili olive oil and mango white balsamic vinegar
Tuscan, Milanese Gremolata or Provençal herbed olive oil with orange white balsamic vinegar
Garlic olive oil and grapefruit white balsamic vinegar
Unflavored olive oil and ‘plain ol’’ dark balsamic vinegar (a classic dipping sauce for bread)
Also, adding a little flavored vinegar is a great way to enhance any glass of plain water, as noted in the Simple Fancy Water recipe.
In my neck of North America, my local small store chain that sells these amazing concoctions is called Olive the Best. The main supplier, however, is in Italy and they sell to differently branded stores in various regions and countries, so find out where you can obtain these great flavored fluids.
While retailers of course sell these online, nothing beats going into the store and doing your own taste tests, either of each separately or in various mixed combinations, since they usually offer as many free tastes in tiny sipping cups as you wish to try. Their psychology is correct — the more you taste, the more you will buy!
Premium extra virgin olive oils such as those sold in these specialty shops can be used in cooking at up to 410ºF/210ºC, so it’s a bit of a myth that you can’t use extra virgin olive oil for cooking. If you need to heat at an even higher temperature, this book’s alternative is avocado oil.
My recipes either call for premixing an oil and vinegar together — for example, by whisking them in a mixing bowl first, as you might do for a salad dressing or marinade — or to apply them in separate phases, such as marinating tofu slices in oil first, then adding a vinegar gloss on top after cooking. Throwing each separately onto a salad and then tossing the salad usually doesn’t work as well compared to mixing them together first.
When dipping bread into a mix, keeping them separate works fine as you can use the bread to mix them together. So, just keep these differences in mind — as to how to combine them — as you play with the recipes. Also note that oil and vinegar do not really mix together without an emulsifier (such as dijon mustard), and so they will remain somewhat separate, though mixing them still does still help with flavor combinations.
