Spring is sprung! The last week’s sunshine has really kick-started salad season for me – quick and easy, prefect for a hot day, and best of all, you can tailor it to your craving of the moment. Salad leaves, pulses, rice or pasta, nuts, meat, fish, and a whole rainbow of vegetables – the choice of salad ingredients is almost endless. But for me what really sets the seal on a great salad is the dressing. Forget those sad shop-bought ones with their added lecithin and MSG: give me a home-crafted vinaigrette any day. Once you have the technique mastered it takes all of ten seconds, and with as many potential ingredients for the vinaigrette as there are for the salad itself, you can really stamp some personality on your very own house dressing.
All about emulsions...
In essence, a simple vinaigrette is the most basic of all salad dressings: it’s an emulsion of oil and vinegar, seasoned with salt. An emulsion is essentially a mixture of two substances which don’t ordinarily mix, such as oil and water. The mixture of these substances is achieved by agitating them (if you whisk together oil and water, for example, they will eventually mix). As you whisk together the oil and vinegar when making your vinaigrette, the vinegar is broken up into tiny droplets which are suspended in the oil. Because vinegar is water-based, it doesn’t like being mixed with oil and will try to run together into larger droplets, and eventually one big pool of vinegar. This is what’s happening when you leave your vinaigrette for a while and it begins to separate. Luckily though, all that’s needed turn it back into a full emulsion is a bit of whisking or a good shake.
Why we love mustard
I like to keep my vinaigrettes in a sealed container like a bottle or jam jar, so that I can shake them up just before using them and don’t have to worry about them splitting. Another way of keeping your vinaigrettes emulsified for longer is to add a stabilizer. This essentially keeps the vinegar suspended in the oil for longer before it starts to separate, leading to a longer-lasting dressing. A commonly used commercial stabiliser is lethicin, which is also found naturally in egg yolks – that’s the reason why mayonnaise, which is also an emulsion, doesn’t split as quickly as vinaigrette.
However, a much better stabiliser to use in your dressing is mustard, which holds it together just long enough for you to linger lovingly over your salad, but not so long that it never splits at all (a trait of commercially-made dressings which I’ve always found faintly sinister). I’ve included mustard in the recipe below because its stabilising properties are useful and I love the flavour it brings to my dressings. However, you can leave it out if you like without causing yourself too many problems.
Some other things
I’ve given a really basic recipe for vinaigrette here, which makes enough to fill your bottle or small jar and cover your salads for weeks to come. Then underneath, there’s a whole list of yummy things to add to this base mixture, to make the vinaigrette your own. Please note that if you keep your vinaigrette in the fridge the oil will solidify after an hour or two: just leave it at room temperature for a bit before you next use it. The amount of oil and vinegar in the dressing should mean it’s pretty safe from bacteria even if you keep it at room temperature – the oil stops them from getting any oxygen and the acidic pH of the vinegar kills them too. Hooray!
Basic Vinaigrette
Makes 400ml
Ingredients
100ml white wine vinegar
300ml oil (Olive oil or a neutral oil such as rapeseed)
1 tsp Mustard or mustard powder
Salt and pepper
Method
Whisk the mustard into the vinegar and add a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Very slowly pour the oil into the vinegar mixture, whisking hard all the time to emulsify the oil into the dressing. The finished dressing should all be the same thick texture and all the oil should be fully incorporated. Once it’s done, taste it and adjust the seasoning to your liking. Then pour over a lovely salad and enjoy!
NB: for a ‘split’ vinaigrette, one in which the oil is not fully emulsified with the vinegar, just pop all the ingredients in a bowl and give a few cursory blows with your whisk. Unlike a split hollandaise, a split vinaigrette is still delicious.
Lovely things to add to your vinaigrette
Balsamic vinegar: Add a teaspoon or two to the white wine vinegar base.
Chilli: Can be used in a thousand ways. Raw or cooked in a little oil; with seeds or without; added to the finished dressing or used to infuse the oil (see below). Using the seeds will make your vinaigrette spicier. Try using rice vinegar as a base, a mixture of equal parts sesame and rapeseed for the oil, and finishing with chilli and lime juice for an Asian-inspired dressing.
Chopped herbs: Parsley, chives and tarragon all add their own distinctive flavour and are lovely used separately or mixed. They’re great when the salad is accompanying steak or grilled chicken. Coriander gives a fresh flavour and goes well with chicken or fish dishes. Dill is of course brilliant with fish, especially salmon. Basil is just generally yummy, and great with some chopped tomato in a ‘split’ dressing (see below). Use fresh herbs (dried ones taste of nothing, except possibly dead grass) and you can add them when you mix the vinegar and mustard or stir them in at the end.
Chopped nuts: Walnuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts...the list is endless. Chop ‘em up and throw ‘em in. Especially good when used in conjunction with the corresponding nut oil (see below).
Chopped tomato: If you’re feeling finicky you can peel it first: cut a cross in the bottom and drop the whole tomato into boiling water for ten seconds, then drop it into cold water. The skin should peel right off. Cut the tomato into quarters, scoop out the seeds, and dice what’s left. Then stir it gently into your dressing. Also nice in a ‘split dressing’.
Flavoured oils: Nut oils such as walnut or hazelnut work very well and are popular in French cuisine. They are made by pressing the natural oil from the nut itself, so you can’t really make your own. Truffle oil, however, is made by infusing a neutral oil with truffle pieces, which you can do yourself if you can source the truffles. You can infuse any oil with herbs; add a sprig or two, heat it gently and leave it in a warm place for an hour or two. Chilli works here too.
Flavoured vinegars: The most common here is raspberry, but if you look around a bit you can find hundreds. You can also make your own by adding a sprig of your favourite herb or some crushed fruit to a standard store-bought white wine vinegar and sealing it tightly for a week or so. Just replace the white wine vinegar in the recipe with the flavoured vinegar of your choice.
Garlic: Crush one clove well (if you sprinkle it with table salt it’ll puree more easily under your knife) and add to the dressing to taste. For a deeper but milder flavour, cut the bottom off a whole head of garlic, wrap it in tinfoil and roast it for half an hour. Then squeeze out all the little cloves, pop them through a sieve, and stir the resulting yummy goo into your finished vinaigrette.
Honey and grainy mustard: Pretty simple really. Use a good squirt of runny honey and a good-quality wholegrain mustard instead of the plain one. Add to the vinegar when you start the dressing.
Lemon juice: Use instead of vinegar (with equal parts lemon juice to oil rather than 1:3) or add a squeeze to your finished dressing. Lovely with parsley, especially if you add a sprinkling of pine nuts to your salad. Also makes a lovely ‘split dressing’.
Shallots: Chop a few very finely and sweat them gently until they’re soft and translucent, or leave them raw for a sharper flavour. Stir them into the dressing at the end.
Sherry or cider vinegar: Use instead of white wine vinegar for a more refined flavour.
All the ingredients listed above can be combined in hundreds of different ways, and they’re only the beginning. Mix your favourites, add a few new ones, and really get creative. Salads will never be the same again!
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