Tea Infused Salad Dressing!
I tend to hyper fixate on ideas/concepts occasionally, and the most recent example of this is tea infused salad dressings. The first one I tried out was Spicy Pina Margarita but I wasn’t super happy with the result so I did a lot more research, and consulted with a couple coworkers for ideas. Then, I was right back at it!
This was my second attempt, and here’s the recipe that I used:
- 1/3 Cup of Distilled White Vinegar
- 2 tablespoons of tea
- 1 clove of garlic (optional, but I did add it for this recipe)
- 2 tablespoons of buckwheat honey
- 2/3 Cup of Olive Oil
- Black Pepper & Salt to Taste
- Mason Jar
- Cheesecloth or some other form of straining device
Basically, you pour the vinegar into a small saucepan and bring it up to a boil. Then, immediately take it off the heat and add in the tea and a crushed clove of garlic. Let that “steep” into the vinegar until it’s completely cold. Then strain it into the mason jar. Add in the honey, shake together until blended. Then, slowly add in the olive oil and shake very vigorously until emulsified.
And bam! You’ve made salad dressing/vinaigrette! It was actually a really easy recipe to follow along with, and I’m super happy with how it turned out! I think the flavour of the tea is definitely quite noticeable, and it just works really well with everything else going on in the recipe – honey, garlic, and whiskey? I mean, that’s a perfect pairing as far as I’m concerned. You can also use any type of honey, vinegar, or oil if you want to slightly tweak the profile to best match whatever tea you’re doing. I went with white vinegar/olive oil because they’re basically the “plainest” options and I really wanted the focus here to be the taste of the tea. For the honey, I chose buckwheat honey to add more depth and richness to the flavour because I didn’t think whisky was something that should necessarily be super “light”. Plus, the molasses/nutty notes of the honey are also great pairings with that flavour.
Other things you could switch around are the spices you add during the “steeping” process, and instead of honey I could have also used agave or eggwhites as my emulsifier. I happen to love the taste of honey, and really lean towards sweeter dressings so that was the best option for me. I also own a lot of “weirder” honeys, which gives me more customization options. Also, you can up the acidity by doing things like adding lemon/lime juice too. Have fun and play with it! The key things are just that you need an acid (vinegar), oil, and emulsifier and you want your ratios to basically match what I outlined in my recipe above…
But yeah, a successful project that I will 100% be trying with other teas! And, for the record, I have now finished off this dressing in different salads because I liked it so much.
