Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m so glad you’re here!
This week, I’m continuing my series on the “mother” sauces of California Cuisine. Since California Cuisine does not have an official list of foundational sauces, and I thought it should, I came up with the following sauces: mayonnaise, vinaigrette, salsa, Bernaise (or Hollandaise), pesto, chimichurri, soy sauce and basic tomato.
In my posts for the last couple of weeks, I have featured recipes for sauces using my first foundational sauce, mayonnaise. These recipes included the sauce for honey-pecan prawns, several different kinds of aioli, tartar sauce and even a really terrific chocolate cake using mayonnaise as a binding ingredient.
Yesterday, I turned my attention to vinaigrette, which I’ll be featuring for the next couple of weeks as we work our way through the mother sauces.
At its most basic, vinaigrette is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. I have used this dressing in a pinch dozens of times and it’s a great, simple way to dress a salad using ingredients that virtually everyone has on hand at all times. The basic ratio is three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper to taste. This little dressing is also great drizzled over fish, chicken or vegetables to give them a little extra punch of flavor, or even used as a dipping sauce for bread–especially when used with a pungent vinegar such as a balsamic.
A basic vinaigrette like this can be very temporarily shaken to create a suspension, and then should be used immediately. The main ingredients, oil and vinegar, will naturally repel one another and begin separating right away. And upon making contact with delicate salad components, such as leafy greens, the oil in the suspension will promptly begin to wilt those helpless greens. As I said, this is ok if you’re eating the salad promptly, but sometimes that’s impractical.
In order to keep the greens from starting to wilt right away, the oil and vinegar must be bound together to prevent the acid from simply slipping off the leaves, leaving the oil to coat and wilt them. Enter the emulsifier. There are several emulsifiers that work well, depending on your tastebuds. They include mustard, honey, egg yolk and my new favorite: garlic paste. All of these agents contain a mixture of proteins and polysaccharides which work together to coat and bind together the oil and vinegar to create a product that thickens the vinaigrette and stabilizes it for a time, enabling it to coat cohesively.
Whole grain mustards and Dijon mustards contain lecithin, which is a common stabilizer. I’ve been using a little mustard in my vinaigrettes for years, but never got a very strong emulsification. Turns out you have to add a good deal of mustard to your vinaigrette to achieve a good emulsification–about 1/2 tsp to every tbsp of vinegar. Since I’m not a big fan of the taste of Dijon mustard, I skimped on the mustard and ended up with a weak emulsification. While it separated quickly, I have always compensated by shaking it up immediately before dressing the salad. But that’s not a practical solution for serving a salad at a dinner party.
So I started doing some experimentation. I started with my recipe for vinaigrette and then read that garlic is also a good emulsifier, owing also to its high levels of lecithin, which become present when pounded into a paste form. I have always minced my garlic for my vinaigrettes, but never tried turning it into a paste. You can buy garlic paste, but I worry that it might be already past its prime. I just put some peeled garlic into a ziplock bag and pounded it with my meat mallet–easy, no fuss, no muss and cleanup was a breeze. You could also use your mortar and pestle for this process.
And then, I did a little testing.
I made a vinaigrette using the prescribed amount of mustard as an emulsifier (on the left) and used the garlic paste in place of chopped garlic (on the right) to see which one would stay in suspension longer. This is a picture of the two vinaigrettes just after having shaken them up:
Here they are after 1.5 minutes:
Here they are after about 5 minutes:
And after about 30 minutes:
As you can see, the solids, like the minced shallots and herbs have fallen to the bottom (and had started falling almost immediately) to the bottom of the shaker, but the solution on the right, using garlic as the emulsifier, stayed in solution for a good deal longer than did the emulsification using the mustard.
Since lecithin seems to be the key ingredient, I have ordered some pure lecithin and I will report back on results when I add it instead of mustard.
The next question is what type of oil is appropriate for emulsification. Olive oil is obviously a good choice: it’s a healthy, monounsaturated fat that complements the tastes of leafy greens, vegetables and meats, and works well in an emulsion. Nut oils are also good choices: they are unsaturated fats that also complement leafy greens, vegetables and meats. I love the flavor of pecan oil and use it in everything from vinaigrettes to baked goods, but other nut oils, such as walnut or almond may need to be used in concert with olive oil so as not to overwhelm the palette.
The types of oils that you shouldn’t choose for your vinaigrette would be one that is comprised of saturated fats such as coconut oil or animal fats. They will revert to a solid form which is inappropriate for a vinaigrette. Also highly refined seed and vegetable oils such as canola, soybean and corn oil, but mainly because they will add no flavor to the vinaigrette.
As for acids, about the only acid I would avoid would be plain old white vinegar, which won’t add any flavor and will be a bit on the harsh side. Other than that, I kinda feel like the sky’s the limit. Vinegars work well, as do citrus juices. My only admonishment is that if you’re experimenting with a sweeter citrus, such as orange, go ahead and balance it out with a more acidic component, like a white wine vinegar or a hit of cider vinegar, which will complement the fruitiness of the orange without overwhelming it.
I also enjoy sherry vinegars, which are lovely for dressing a fall salad of apples or pears, greens and blue cheese. Or try a lemon vinaigrette with delicate greens, fennel and radishes. Or, indeed, a lovely honey, ginger vinaigrette on a spinach salad. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll be sharing those recipes in upcoming posts.
And then there’s balsamic vinegar, which I’ll cover in my next post. For now, I will leave you with one piece of advice: a little balsamic goes A LONG WAY.
Please join me tomorrow for more fun in vinaigrette land!
Until then–
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
