holy shit this is literally the best fucking post in the entire spam forum. The most outrageous area of the grocery store is not the frozen section, nor the canned section, nor even the gross pre-made foods section. I am happy to partake of certain kinds of frozen or canned produce in the wintertime (they are usually better than fresh, when out of season), and I have been known to buy whole rotisserie chickens, theoretically to turn the carcass into stock, but really to gorge on heavily salted flesh for two days straight. No, the most frustrating and worthless aisle, the one from which no self-respecting adult should ever purchase anything, under absolutely any circumstances, is the salad dressing aisle. There is no greater substantiation of the international reputation of American home cooking than pre-bottled salad dressing. A simple vinaigrette, like a classic balsamic, has like three ingredients—not one of which goes bad—and a superior version can be made at home for a small fraction of the price in about fifteen seconds. To save those fifteen seconds, Americans will sacrifice money, flavor, and, frankly, our dignity, and buy pre-made garbage. This is not always our fault! Sometimes we have been raised on these dressings, and sometimes the tv chefs can make them seem difficult. Whisking? Drizzling a thin stream of oil to emulsify? Lightly macerating shallots? This seems complicated, and unwelcome, given that this dressing is usually going to go on a salad, a dish many of us only grudgingly eat. But no, friends: Salad dressing can be extraordinary. I love salad dressing, and vinaigrettes in particular. Creamy dressings, like ranch and blue cheese, are immature, inferior condiments; they mask, rather than accentuate, the flavors of vegetables, which are often more subtle and delicate than the big dumb idiot flavors of meats. Use blue cheese dressing on buffalo wings, not on vegetables. A vinaigrette, though, is a beautiful thing. I use them on salads, sure, but also on pretty much everything else: on a stir-fry, on a platter of roasted vegetables, on a sandwich, on oysters or fish. The vinaigrette—at its core, nothing more than an emulsion (a homogeneous mixture) of oil and vinegar—is fantastically flexible; I have yet to find a cuisine that a vinaigrette can’t encapsulate. Making vinaigrettes is a great introduction to cooking. New cooks often aren’t quite sure how to season—not because they don’t understand the techniques, but because they aren’t sure how to taste and adjust. Something like a soup, which may have many many ingredients, can be very hard to season for the inexperienced cook; the knack of knowing when a soup needs butter, or salt, or dried herbs, or stock, is something that comes with time and practice. But a vinaigrette never has more than a few ingredients, and can thus serve as a cook’s version of dissecting a worm: It’s all pretty simple in there. The key to a great vinaigrette is to capture several different flavors at once: something sour, something sweet, something savory, something fatty, and usually something spicy. An inexperienced cook can play around, adding more salt, more oil, more vinegar, more spice, more whatever, tasting and re-tasting until it seems right. This is how you become a good cook, not by reading things; cookbooks are dumb, this column is dumb, I am personally very dumb.
Wow so deep, almost saw Adele rolling in it, deepest post of Sythe. Raise awareness for the vinegerettes of the world. For only 9,99$ you can partake in funding the of the vinegerette overtaking the world campaign. pm for pp.
