A good vinaigrette will perk up and add flavour to any salad. If you use it sparingly it doesn't have to compromise any fancy diets that you might be on. It also might make the salad tasty enough for you to stick with the diet.
Making them is easy. Find a suitable container that you can seal properly. I like using old herb/spice containers that have a screw cap, like the Marks & Spencers jars pictured. Here is a simple vinaigrette mix that I use a lot, the quantities are expressed in ratios:
- 5/8 olive oil
- 1/8 balsamic vinegar
- 2/8 red wine vinegar
Shake well prior to using, there is no need to wait for any special infusing to happen.
If you can get your hands on it, look for red wine vinegar that is raspberry infused.
The stuff is very hard to track down. It seems to be a French specialty - a friend who lives in Bilbao alerted me to it, and he can only get it in France. Marks & Spencers used to do it, but you might only find it in larger stores (I can't get it locally). However I lucked out shopping this week, and found some in a health food store (Evergreen). This is a French import, if the lack of English on the bottle is anything to go by. However it is much better than what I got in M&S, the raspberry is much more distinct (twice the price though). Use it as a direct replacement, it makes for an awesome vinaigrette - light, fruity and sweet.
You can go with a stronger proportion of balsamic vinegar too, but I find that it overpowers the food. Whats more interesting is when you experiment with the oils. Hazelnut oil has a very distinctive and pleasant taste that is nice to add into salads. Walnut oil is another good salad oil, but I don't think it would work well in the vinaigrette combination above.
The other main advantage of using a DIY vinaigrette is that you know how much you are putting in the salad. It can be hard to tell with store bought products.
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