Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [59]
VINAIGRETTE
The first ingredient in Wish-Bone Italian dressing: water, which explains the lack of body. The second ingredient: soybean oil—a cheap, comparatively unhealthful fat. The fifth ingredient: sugar, which is unnecessary in a vinaigrette. But the biggest problem with Wish-Bone is that it doesn’t taste very good.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Slight. Triple or quadruple the recipe and store in the refrigerator until it runs out.
Cost comparison: Homemade: $0.60 for a half cup. Wish-Bone: $0.63.
3 tablespoons vinegar (your choice)—red wine, white wine, sherry, blackberry
1½ teaspoons Dijon mustard
7 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
In a small jar, mix the vinegar and mustard. Add the olive oil, cap tightly, and shake until blended. Season to taste with salt and pepper, then shake again.
Makes a generous ½ cup
FRUIT VINEGAR
The first vinegar I tried making was fruit vinegar, using the fascinating recipes I found in Diana Kennedy’s From My Mexican Kitchen. To make banana vinegar, you put collapsing, blackened bananas, unpeeled, in a colander over a bowl, cover with a towel, and let the fruit disintegrate and drip and drip and drip into the bowl for many days. “Lots of little flies will swarm around because of the fermentation,” Kennedy writes. And they did. Midway through the banana vinegar project, we invited some prospective friends to dinner and a few hours before their appointed arrival time, I took the vinegar outside. I hoped the flies would follow. They did not. Moreover, the disappearance of the bananas seemed to throw the flies into confusion, and as we sat there in the living room, the little flies zoomed around at eye level. I apologized once, and then tried to maintain my poise. We had a good time with these new friends but it’s been two years and they still haven’t called to invite us back so I guess we should now call them “acquaintances.” Was it the flies, or was it us? Which is worse?
In any case, when the bananas had given their all, they left behind an inky fluid that I mixed with brown sugar, decanted into a jar, and capped. It was sweet and rich and complex and scant. Three pounds of bananas ultimately yielded a cup of vinegar. Between the small quantity, the effect on our social life, and the fact that you can use blackened bananas to make banana bread, which is better, I crossed banana vinegar off my list.
To make pineapple vinegar, in a big jar you combine the peelings from a pineapple with water and sugar and let them ferment. No flies. However, writes Kennedy, “If things don’t go according to order, small white maggots will float on the top.” Fortunately, things went according to order and I ended up with about a quart of honey-gold vinegar that smelled like pineapple. Alas, it was barely tart. It was a feeble vinegar, incapable of standing up to oil in a dressing, however lovely its fragrance.
Berry Vinegar
No, the best vinegar I’ve made is simply wine vinegar infused with berries. I once made raspberry vinegar and it was stupendous, but since raspberries cost a fortune, for the next batch I used the wild blackberries that grow all along the road to my house and produce many pounds of jammy fruit every July. The spicy berries balanced out the acid and made one of my all-time favorite vinegars.
Make it or buy it? Make it—but only with free wild berries.
Hassle:
None Cost comparison: If you have to buy raspberries, it can cost $5.00 per cup to make raspberry vinegar. Store-bought: $2.55. Blackberry vinegar made with wild fruit: between $0.50 and $2.00 per cup depending on whether you use cheap red wine vinegar or really cheap red wine vinegar.
1 pound blackberries or raspberries
2 cups red or white wine vinegar
1. Combine the vinegar and berries in a clean glass jar. Cap tightly and let macerate for