June 11th, 2014
05:00 PM ET
America's Test Kitchen is a real 2,500 square foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston that is home to more than three dozen full¬time cooks and product testers. Our mission is simple: to develop the absolute best recipes for all of your favorite foods. To do this, we test each recipe 30, 40, sometimes as many as 70 times, until we arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most¬ foolproof recipe. America’s Test Kitchen's online cooking school is based on nearly 20 years of test kitchen work in our own facility, on the recipes created for Cook's Illustrated magazine, and on our two public television cooking shows. Vinaigrette may be the most useful sauce in any cook's repertoire, because in addition to dressing greens, it can be used as sauce for chicken, fish, and vegetables that have been grilled, poached, or steamed. The ingredient list is short and method is simple. So what's the problem? Basic vinaigrette doesn't stay together. By the time you pour it over greens and get the salad to the table, this emulsified sauce has broken and you end up with overly vinegary and oily bites of salad. Which is where our recipe for a foolproof dressing that won't break comes in. Foolproof Vinaigrette Ingredients: 1 Tablespoon wine vinegar (red, white, or champagne) Instructions: 1. Mince 1 shallot to yield 1 1/2 teaspoons. More from America's Test Kitchen: Previously: |
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mayonnaise and mustard? no no no! balsamic vinegar, an excellent olive oil, spice and garlic… now we are talking.
Yummy!
Couldn't this person have cleaned the fingernails prior to filming. Good sounding recipe. Fingernails, yuk factor.
I thought they were going to say bacon.....
So I start to read the recipe and get to the mayonnaise and stop there. I am of the old school: a Vinaigrette is a beautiful combination of vinegar, oil and herbs – when shaken it becomes a temporary emulsion and then returns to it's clarity. To each his own!
Mayo contains eggs and oil, and a few dried spices. So, not exactly an odd thing.
Ehhh....in my book any dressing made with olive oil and vinegar is a vinaigrette. I've never used mayo though. And I nearly always use some kind of citrus juice. Olive oil, balsamic, green onion, Dijon, sesame seeds, salt, pepper, parsley is fabulous over chicken.
oops....and orange or lemon juice. Forgot that. :)
This sounds kind of like a bland Caesar salad dressing with no lemon juice or anchovies. Why not use an egg yolk for the emulsifier instead of mayo? The mayo is made from eggs but has been cooked. Real Caesar salad dressing has raw eggs of course.
Bob:
The emulsifiyer in vinegarette dressing is not mayo. 1 egg yolk will emulsify 14 onces of oil. The emulsifyier in a vinegarette is the mustard. it's not as strong an emulsifyer as egg yolk but it makes for a lighter dressing. Plus mustard provides a lot of bightness as well. leave the mayo out of this recipe and see what happens. My guess is the reason there is mayo in the recipe is that it's emulsion is already started and it's easier to get an emulsion going if your emaultion is already started. By the way, butter is an emulsion as well.
Bob, I like that!
She's a media whore, who would say AND do anything for $.
She is a bad joke for the GOP whenever she opens her mouth.
Independent voter
So many different variations here:
I make one version of what we call "vinaigrette" with balsamic, mustard, salt and pepper, Miso and peanut butter (a small amount). You can change so many things here. Another tip is to leave the greens and the "additional items" separate, allowing the "additions" such as cucumber, tomato, nuts, dried fruit, etc. to soak in the dressing for 5 minutes or so before spooning it on top of a heap of greens. Gotta love salads.
A vinaigrette with mustard & mayo? That's ... different.
I make mine with mustard and no mayo.
Is that still vinaigrette?
Technically no. But food is an ever-changing thing, so you can't really draw a line in the sand. It used to be that whiskey made in Kentucky was the only one that could be called "bourbon." That is changing now, too.