No Regret Vinaigrette

Get all shook up about salad dressing

For the first few weeks of culinary school you hardly touch a stove.  But one of first things you do learn is that there is a correct way to do things:  how to hold your knife, how to tie your apron, and how the only correct answer to any question is “Yes Chef!”

And on the list of all the “correct” things to know is that there are five mother sauces. The concept of “mother sauce” is generally attributed to chef Auguste Escoffier and while vinaigrette doesn’t make the cut of being one of the five, it probably ought to - it’s one of the most useful arrows in a cook’s quiver because while it follows a simple formula it is a blank slate for culinary creativity.

And whisking a vinaigrette by hand is some old-school cooking shit - most people don’t ever learn how and culinary school chefs delight in watching new students struggle to make and fix broken sauces - it’s one of their favourite forms of entertainment, up there with teaching students French swear words and smoking bales of tobacco.

So while it may be far from salad season for many people, a vinaigrette is a classic secret weapon to add flavour to roasted vegetables and grain bowls, and can even pinch hit as an easy marinade for meat and seafood when you don’t know what’s to make for dinner.

The formula is simple: 3 parts fat to 1 part acid.

Now, you could toss your salad or veggies with some olive oil and add some vinegar and consider it done, but it’s not going to taste very good. Some forkfuls will have oil, some a nasty acidic bite, and a lot of it will end up in the bottom of the bowl. This makes for a sad salad.

You could put your oil and vinegar in a jar and shake the ever-loving daylights out of it, but it’s still going to split. Mechanical force will only hold them together for so long. You end up with a dressing that does this:

To make your vinaigrette hold together chef-style you need to make stable emulsion using an emulsifier. An emulsifier is an additive that allows oil to suspend in water, or water to suspend in oil. Commercially processed foods contain all kinds of emulsifiers with chemically-sounding names: soy lecithin, mono- and diglycerides, polysorbates, carrageenan, guar gum, etc. Many of these are derived from natural sources like seaweed and aren’t nearly as scary as they sound, but nor are they common ingredients for home cooks.

Thankfully though, you probably have a couple of common emulsifiers in your kitchen right now: mustard and egg yolks. If you’ve ever made Caesar salad at home you likely used raw egg yolks. But some folks get squicked-out by the thought of raw eggs so for our purposes we’re going to use mustard.

I’m going to break with my usual practice and give you an actual recipe instead of simply a formula, but feel free to substitute ingredients - just remember the ratio of 3:1.

You’ll need:

1/4 cup/60ml of red wine vinegar

1 tablespoon/15ml of dijon mustard

1 teaspoon/5ml of maple syrup or honey

Salt and pepper to taste (start with a pinch of each)

3/4 cup/180ml of olive oil

For tools you’ll need a large bowl, a whisk, a damp cloth, and a measuring cup with a pouring spout.

• Stabilize your bowl on your damp cloth. You are going to be whisking and pouring at the same time and you do not want your bowl sliding all over the counter.

• Add all your ingredients EXCEPT THE OIL to a bowl and whisk to combine.

  

• While whisking, SLOWLY trickle in your oil. Don’t rush it or it will split. Think of whisking as a back and forth motion and not like a stirring motion. Whisking back and forth creates air channels as the layers of liquids move towards each other (shear force for you physics nerds). It’s very efficient!

• Gradually add more oil as you continue whisking. If you see the oil separating around the edges (like in the pic below) stop pouring and keep whisking until it comes back together.

  

Once you have finished adding your oil keep whisking for another minute. Your vinaigrette will have thickened considerably and be fairly uniform in texture. It often doesn’t taste very good on it’s own so feel free to dunk a lettuce leaf or the like to help you adjust seasonings.

Vinaigrette can be stored in the fridge in a jar, but I like the cheap squeeze bottles from the dollar store. It’s not sexy but it does the job.

And before you ask - do you really need to add sweetener? Yes- you do. While lots of folks are trying to cut sugar from their diet a bit of sweetness is necessary to balance the acidity. You don’t need to make your vinaigrette sweet (unless you want to) but you will notice the absence of sugar if you don’t use any.

(And while we’re on the topic, want to know how they make low-fat store-bought dressings? They add more sugar and emulsifiers to compensate for the lack of fat, sometimes such the the caloric difference is negligible. Do with that information what you will.)

In the end though, vinaigrette is a technique more than a recipe. You can make endless variations with different fats and acids. Sherry vinegar and walnut oil? Melted butter and lemon juice? Bacon fat and red wine vinegar? Add fresh herbs, minced shallot or citrus zest if you’re inspired. Hot mustard or honey mustard? Use up that jar of pickle juice instead of vinegar. How about a spoonful of marmalade or pomegranate molasses instead of honey?

Once you get the hang of it you can play with the ratio too. You can go as low as 1:1 if you want, though you might want to balance it with a bit more sweetness. Too sour for ya? Head for a 4:1 ratio with more fat, or sub some water or stock for part of the vinegar. Just watch how thick it gets if you start mucking with the ratio; too thick and it will be gloopy and make your lettuce leaves stick together, so be ready to thin it a bit if necessary.

And if your dressing breaks and separates? Shake it up, or pour a few drops into a clean bowl and get whisking; when you trickle the broken dressing back in (just like you did with the oil) it will blend back together with a little patience and muscle.

Once your get into the habit of making your own vinaigrettes you will probably walk past the salad dressing aisle - why buy what you can make for a fraction of the price, especially when you can make it exactly to your taste? Your cooking becomes unique to you and your palate and no pre-made product can do that.