Ruhlman's Twenty (33 page)

FOR DECADES IN THE UNITED STATES,
we’ve known this tart combination of oil, vinegar, and flavorings as salad dressing. Yet what I grew up seeing in store-bought bottles in the refrigerator door in the 1970s can be a fantastic sauce on
anything
—on steak, on pork, on chicken, on green vegetables, on starchy vegetables, with cheese, and, in principle at least, on desserts. It even works, yes, on salad.

The principle is simple. One of the key flavor components in any dish is acidity, along with salty, sweet, bitter, and savory flavors. We also evaluate the pleasure of a dish according to textural categories: crunchy or soft, smooth or coarse, fat or lean. A vinaigrette combines two of the most important of those qualities, acidity and fat. After that, it’s simply a matter of flavoring a vinaigrette. The vinaigrette is so variable and so versatile that one way to think about it is as a mother sauce.

In culinary school, chefs in training learn the French system of sauce classification created in the nineteenth century by Antonin Carême, who divided sauces into four broad categories of mother sauces, each of which had myriad offspring. Brown sauce, or
sauce Espagnole,
could become any number of sauces depending on what you add to it—a wine reduction for a Bordelaise sauce, mustard for a
sauce Robert
—and a
milk-based béchamel
could become Mornay if you add cheese and Nantua if you add reduced shellfish stock. Such classifications were born of restaurant cooking and the ability to produce many different dishes quickly. Mother sauces could be made in the morning and finished
à la minute
when they were needed. Carême listed four mother sauces. Escoffier got rid of one (sauces enriched with yolk and cream) and added tomato sauce, calling them “foundation” sauces. Some authorities also include the emulsified butter sauce, such as hollandaise, among the mothers.

The vinaigrette deserves to be in this group of utilitarian sauces. It’s the most important sauce for the home cook. Its effects are powerful; it can be made from what we commonly have on hand (oil and vinegar); it’s a sauce that doesn’t require stock; and it’s most in line with the contemporary palate, which eschews high-fat butter sauces and protein-dense stock reductions. Think of vinaigrette as a base for countless variations.

A vinaigrette is traditionally made of three parts oil and one part acid. This baseline, always a good place to start, makes a perfect
classic red wine vinaigrette
. After you mix it, taste it and evaluate its acidity. If you like a sharper vinaigrette, add a little more vinegar. The basic vinaigrette can be enhanced with other flavors—minced shallot, garlic, fresh herbs (added at the last minute). You might want to balance it with something sweet, a few pinches of brown sugar, a roasted shallot, a hit of balsamic vinegar.

The vinaigrette is infinitely variable. Replace the neutral oil with a flavorful nut oil. Alter the vinegar, from red wine to white wine or any of the countless flavored vinegars now available. Use a citrus juice instead of vinegar. Consider adding spices—cumin, cayenne, coriander, or allspice, clove, or cinnamon. Consider other flavoring elements as well, mustard, say, or peanut butter, or anchovies, or roasted peppers, or ginger.

My Cleveland colleague Michael Symon, restaurateur and Iron Chef, includes a salsa verde, “green sauce,” in his book, Live to Cook, which he spoons generously over roasted chicken. The sauce is thick with ingredients—parsley and mint, anchovies, garlic, shallot, capers, jalapeño, and red pepper flakes. But with the juice of a lemon and ½ cup/120 milliliters olive oil, it is, at its core, a vinaigrette, and it’s fabulous on a roasted chicken.

We don’t have pan juices to initiate a sauce for grilled/barbecued meats, but a flavorful vinaigrette is often a perfect complement. Think of a mint-garlic vinaigrette for grilled lamb or a spicy oregano vinaigrette for grilled steak.

The final consideration in a vinaigrette—after you’ve determined your acid and oil, your seasonings, and your flavoring ingredients—is texture. A classic vinaigrette is emulsified: the oil is whipped or blended into the vinegar and seasonings so that it’s thick and stable, and does not separate back out. If you stir all the ingredients together at once, the vinaigrette will be loose, which may be what you want.

Finally, there are creamy vinaigrettes. They can use cream but more commonly are based on emulsions. A creamy vinaigrette is, in effect, a loose acidic mayonnaise.

Learning how to put the vinaigrette to use in your kitchen will ratchet up your entire cooking repertoire.

Of the several ways to mix a vinaigrette, none is better than another. The method you choose depends on your situation and what effect you’re after.

Simply combining the ingredients and stirring them just before you use them is the easiest and most common way to mix vinaigrettes. Some people combine everything in a jar and shake. That works fine, but the oil will quickly separate from the vinegar, so you need to pour the vinaigrette immediately.

Many home cooks have immersion blenders or hand blenders. I do—it’s probably my most-used small appliance. I highly recommend it. Immersion blenders usually come with a cup-and-blade attachment, ideal for making small quantities of vinaigrettes. Just combine all the ingredients and process briefly. Immersion blenders also come with a whisk attachment, which saves a lot of effort.

Traditionally, vinaigrettes are emulsified, that is, the oil is evenly dispersed and won’t separate from the vinegar. In the same way that you make a mayonnaise, you can mix a vinaigrette. Depending on how vigorously you whip the oil, and whether you include an emulsifier such as an egg yolk or a high proportion of mustard, the thicker it will be.

Creamy vinaigrettes,
typically mayonnaise based, are made in the same way mayonnaise is mixed, but depending on how you’re using them, they’re considerably thinner than mayonnaise.

Vinaigrettes can be made in a standard blender, which can result in a vinaigrette you can stand a spoon in. For large quantities of vinaigrettes, a stand mixer with the whisk attachment is excellent.

However you mix, the vinaigrette is all about the type of acidity, the amount of acidity, often a sweet component (onion, sugar) to balance that acidity, and additional aromatics and spices added to what can be the home cook’s most versatile and valuable sauce.