Thoughts on vinegar (and truffles)

"What would I need vinegar for?" is something I was asked recently.

And why indeed. Vinegar is sharp, sour, strong-tasting, and not for the feeble. How many of you have lots of different vinegar bottles in the cupboard that you never touch? I for one have bought rice vinegar, raspberry vinegar, sherry vinegar, strawberry and champagne vinegar, to name a few, and each time I discover them it's like Christmas, "oh, did I have that?"

Vinegar as seasoning
Vinegar was indeed used as a cheap way of seasoning meals in the middle ages, and still is. Just think of a british "chippy" pouring vinegar on your fish and chips! A lot of us use lemons to finish dishes, or sprinkle on fish, or whatever, and vinegars can serve the same purpose. The various flavours can add variety. Make sure you don't use too much--like tobasco (tm), a few drops go a long way. I once put too much vinegar in a bean dish and boy it was almost inedible.

Be adventurous here, try some drops of your handy wine or flavored vinegar on meats, vegetables, sandwiches, whatever. And certainly anywhere you would use lemon. Not that I mind lemon, but it lets us play with different flavors.

And use your thumb on the bottle to let only a drop out at a time. Unless you have a sore on your thumb. Then it hurts like hell.

Vinegar in dressing
This is of course the most common way to use vinegar for the home cook. It amazes me that you can buy salad dressing in the store, when it is chemically altered to be thick and nasty, and often so sweet. Even the "all natural" kinds taste fake to me. The easiest way to dress a salad is to sprinkle a little vinnegar (a few drops, always better to have too little than too much) on the salad and then some oil after. A little salt and pepper, and that is litterally the proverbial "it". And people will be amazed at how good your salads taste. So here you can use any kind of vinegar as well. My best results are with a shallot flavored one for a sharp taste, and a raspberry vinegar for a more sweet fruity flavour. But anything goes!

Vinegar in sauce
Some sauces need vinegar, like a beure blanc which starts out with a wine and vinegar base.

Here's a recipe of beure blanc:

• First chop up a stick of cold butter (about 125g) into small cubes, put in a bowl and keep in the fridge til later
  
• Chop up a shallott onion as finely as you can
• Add this to a small saucepan, with about 1 dl (half a glass) of dry white wine and an equal amount of white wine (or other kind) vinegar
• Let the shallotts boil in the wine and vinegar until there is hardly a tablespoon of liquid left
• Take out the butter from the fridge. Reduce the heat in the pan to low or off and whisk in the butter bits, piece by piece. The idea is not to melt the butter but emulsify it in the sauce. This is why we needed vinegar!
• Keep whisking butter in until ready to serve. It can keep on (very) low heat for a while, but should be whisked now and again because it can easily separate.

Here vinegar is a key component chemically in the sauce. Otherwise vinegar can be added at the end of a sauce as a seasoning, to freshen it up.

What about truffles?
I promised truffles. I have got a truffle vinegar which I hope to be selling through Sarrazac. Sounds exotic, but how to use it? I have tried it on salads, where very little gives a bit of depth and bittersweetness to the leaves, but too much makes it heavy. A chef recently suggested a beure blanc with truffle vinegar, or perhaps a blend of white wine and truffle vinegars. I have put some on dishes as diverse as macaroni & cheese (mildly successful) to fish and lentil stew (quite good, fish like acidic stuff, like lemons, and the truffle taste had a nice contrast while staying fresh). So there you go, hopefully soon more of you will have the chance to try it out.