Several years ago I discovered oil and vinegar wasn’t what you put on salad when you didn’t have “real” dressing. Use good oil and good vinegar and it was better than most store-bought dressings. “Good” doesn’t mean canola oil and distilled white vinegar.
Usually it’s extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, but I’ve got about a half-dozen different vinegars in the cupboard. The folks at Nakano offered me a sample of their seasoned rice vinegar. I didn’t have any yet, so I took them up on it.
I’m not too thrilled that the Original flavor they sent me had high fructose corn syrup. But I have to admit I don’t ask to see the ingredients when I get a salad at a restaurant, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
And you know what? It’s pretty good. I did a really simple salad to make sure I was tasting the vinegar and not everything else I was adding. The one thing I did add was the Garlic Gold nuggets with Parmesan.
They got it exactly right on the label: light and tangy. I tried to come up with different words to say the same thing, but they nailed it.
If you don’t mind HFCS, they’ve got a half-dozen flavors to try. I’d rather stick with the Natural one, that’s just the vinegar and water. I can add my own flavors.
Hopefully they’ll start hearing from other people that we’d like their products better without the HFCS.
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Try adding a bit of sesame oil next time. The flavor can be strong so it’s best to use just a little at first.
We almost always eat our salads with oil, vinegar, salt and garlic – maybe the occasional herb blend. I have this vinegar in the pantry, but I find myself reaching for the homemade red wine vinegar most nights. We really only use the balsamic for tomato and cheese salads, and even that is only for a change from our nightly red wine vinegar salad. I sometimes mix it up with walnut or hazelnut oil, but even there its usually canola (yes, canola, so we taste the veggies and not the oil) or olive oil. Homemade red wine vinegar is so easy to make, and we like it so much better. (Add a little cider vinegar or yeasty bread to a bottle of decent red wine, wait until it smells like vinegar.)
I know someone who keeps a wine bottle on the kitchen counter. It starts with a quarter-cup of vinegar, then any night they don’t finish a bottle, they pour the remainder into the one on the counter.
When it’s full, it goes in the pantry until it’s done turning into vinegar.
I usually have this in my pantry because I like Asian flavors in my cooking. The best beef marinade I’ve made has hoisin, say sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, plum jam, lemongrass, ginger and garlic. I’ll use part of it as a sauce after cooking it with a bit of cornstarch.
One of my favorite vinegars.
Wow, that’s amazing that they put HFCS in vinegar. I guess that’s another label I need to start reading. We use a lot of the raw apple cider vinegar at our house for salad dressing.
I’ve tried cider vinegar for salad and never liked it. It’s great for ribs and barbecue sauce, though.
There are other brands of seasoned rice vinegar that do not use HFCS. In my pantry right now is a bottle of Marukan brand seasoned rice vinegar.
We avoid HFCS; a while back I was making these lovely homemade granola bars. One of the ingredients was Rice Krispies. My husband loved them, so I made them a lot for him to take as snacks to work. He took them on bike rides. I felt so clever.
Then he noticed the numbers on the scale creeping upwards. I happened to read an article (this was back in 2002) about HFCS and how our body processes it. We cut out all food with HFCS, and my husband lost 20 pounds without doing anything else. Freaky.
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