"There are no green sauce rules — only what tastes good to you."
Margaret Eby/Food and Wine
Today I'm back to Nigel Slater's batch of first recipes that he calls A few essentials:
"a few basics, a handful of what I think of as 'essentials', that I would genuinely hate to live without ... They are small details that make a big difference" Nigel Slater
Today it's the turn of "A green sauce for almost everything'.
He then gives a list of ingredients - 10g of basil leaves, 15g of parsley and 10g of mint, 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar, 6 anchovy fillets, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Blend, pouring 100ml olive oil to a 'thick, emerald paste'. Stir in a tablespoon of capers. And that's it.
The photograph at the top is deliberately generic. Nigel doesn't really have a photograph online of the above sauce. Indeed I cannot find the recipe itself - as described there. But that's really the point about green sauce - the green sauce I am talking about today. It's not pesto, or salsa verde, or chimichurri or even mint sauce it's just A green sauce for almost everything. Although, that said, his is a bit close to the Italian salsa verde.
So before I stray too far from salsa verde, let me recommend a recipe and a post called The sauce is greener by Rachel Roddy on here own website - Rachel Eats.
"This piquant, salty, fresh, grassy, sour, oily, punchy, slap of a sauce "
On having moved to Italy, she learnt after a while to make 'proper' salsa verde, but decided once she had mastered this to experiment a bit adding, amongst other things, basil and mint to the traditional parsley, which met with vehement disapproval from the Italians. However, she persisted, arriving eventually at a recipe that she could pass on although stressing that everything is really up for grabs. The one thing she didn't seem to thing was up for grabs, however, was that you had to chop everything by hand - with a knife. This is not a chuck everything into the blender or food processor kind of thing - for her anyway. Why?:
"You can of course make your green sauce in a food processor! However, I’d like – if you don’t mind – to give you three good reasons to make your green sauce with a sharp knife. Firstly, because only by chopping will you achieve the chaotic, tumbling more-salad-than-sauce textual delight. A food processor – bless – can’t help but obliterate all the ingredients into a bit of a pulpy slurry. Secondly, for the stupendous heady aroma that pervades your kitchen when your knife hits the parsley, mint and basil. If I ever faint in your presence, please waft a board of chopped herbs under my nose. Thirdly, when chopped rather than blitzed, your green sauce will be greener." Rachel Roddy
Well - up to you. Personally I think you can stop before a slurry with a food processor. It almost inevitably depends on your mood or the time available. "You are looking for a loose still spoonable – but not runny or oily – consistency, a thick, gloopy, snooker-baize coloured pond." she says, but I think you can get that in a food processor too.
Jamie Oliver also plays with the salsa verde concept, and seems to agree with Rachel Roddy that you chop everything by hand. He has olives and pistachios in his Green Sauce, however and also plays with pesto by adding pistachios to the mix, and maybe even tapenade with green olives. Cornichons too.
So what we are looking at here is a sauce that is green in colour, and which can be used in just about any way you can think of - as a dip, as the extra good thing on top of or mixed in with anything - anything at all - except dessert - though probably somebody, somewhere has done that too.
It might be based on the idea of a classic sauce, like green tahini sauce - as in Ottolenghi's recipe for Shawarma cauliflower and green tahini sauce but he also comments that:
"Tahini sauce, green or otherwise, is one of my favourites. If I don’t have herbs at home, or if I just fancy a change, I’ll often mix in some miso or soy for a deep, savoury hit. Or, if I want some chilli heat, I’ll add chilli flakes, harissa or similar chilli pastes such as doubanjiang and gochujang; just remember to add plenty of lemon or lime juice to balance things out."
David Lebovitz too plays with the classic green tahini sauce, with an adaptation of Susan Spungen's recipe for Green everything sauce. This one is different again and is a Middle-Eastern/Asian fusion as well, by adding fish sauce, which is certainly not a Middle-Eastern thing.
I began this post with Nigel Slater and a variation really of a classic sauce, plus the notion that one should have a jar of such a sauce in the fridge at all times, to spice up whatever you are cooking or eating. Or maybe even eat striaght out of the jar as a few of them suggested. Because it's a sauce:
"A sauce is any preparation - liquid or semi-liquid - that adds moisture and flavour to food." OTK Extra Good Things
Fairly soon however, I found the other approach - 'the waste not want not' approach, and as an aside here, I was amazed that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall does not seem to have any advice or recipes on the subject. There were a few good general articles however - the best being from Margaret Eby on the Food and Wine website in an article called If you've got greens you've got green sauce, which began by saying:
"there comes a time when the cilantro is about 24 hours from giving up. That's when it's time to pull out the blender and make green sauce."
Rather than give an exact or even vague recipe this article was full of general advice such as:
"The basic formula for a green sauce is tender herbs and/or greens, acid, a generous pinch of salt, and fat. ... Throw it in the blender, pulse it, taste it, and adjust it to your liking. ... If it's veering too sharp or too spicy, I add more fat. If it's not bright enough, I add more acid, either a squeeze of citrus juice or a tablespoon or two of any vinegar that's on hand—red wine, white wine, sherry, and distilled vinegars work well here. If it's too thick, I'll drizzle in a few tablespoons of water. It can be chunky or smooth, spicy or mild, and any shade of green. Green sauce is very forgiving."
Vegans and health food advocates love the concept, and although they have specific recipes, such as this one for Everything sauce from Plant You their general approach which tends to include things like kale, and other leafy green vegetables as well as avocado and various seeds. Isn't it odd that in this photograph this probably very tasty, and very healthy sauce, somehow looks almost institutional and a tiny bit grim? Or is that just me?
Obviously if you have a host of these things teetering on the edge - well greens get to the edge much quicker than other things - then you could use them too. I should have done this with some herbs, and some almost dying spring onions, which eventually did die - almost became liquid, and had to be thrown into the compost.
Tom Hunt even used the woody ends of asparagus, as well as the asparagus itself for the dressing for his Green goddess salad - a variation on another classic - Green Goddess dressing. And incidentally your green sauce can also be diluted a bit with oil to make a salad dressing. The salad too can consist of almost pass their usefulness date greens.
The simplest sauce of all that I found came from Nigella, with her Coriander and jalapeño sauce which just consisted of coriander, jalapeños, garlic and lime juice with, the almost mandatory olive oil and sea salt. It's green - very green in fact, and probably pretty spicy - but yes it's green.
So maybe we should all start experimenting with what's green and in the fridge and needs using, without reference to all those 'this goes with that' rulings that we might be familiar with.
I'm all for it but I suspect that they are all right when they say it will keep for a week in the fridge, and I probably wouldn't use it all up in that time-frame. And then it would languish in the back until I have to throw it out ...
Rachel Roddy, on the other hand, was pretty happy with her experiments and said that she would like her epitaph to say:
"She – after experimentation and sound advice – made a good green sauce."
POSTSCRIPT
October 10 - double figures already.
2023 - Nothing
2022 - Nothing
2020 - Tortilla things
2017 - Nothing
Comments