California · Sauce
Green Goddess Dressing
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, acid holding everything up to the light, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- 200g mayonnaise
- 120ml sour cream
- 4 anchovy fillets
- 3 tbsp tarragon, chopped
- 3 tbsp chives, chopped
- 3 tbsp parsley, chopped
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
- 1 garlic clove
- Salt and pepper
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · egg · fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Blend the anchovies, garlic, lemon juice, and vinegar into a paste.
- Add the herbs and blend until the mixture turns bright green.
- Fold in the mayonnaise and sour cream: blending them fully can loosen the emulsion.
- Season with salt and pepper.
- Chill at least an hour so the herbs perfume the base. Use within three days while the color holds.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Building an emulsion 40 recipes
- It visibly thickens as the fat goes in, heavier and more opaque than either part was alone, which is the emulsion announcing itself.
- At no point is there a pool of free fat sitting ahead of the work: fat went in no faster than it disappeared into the body.
- Glossy and homogeneous, with no slick floating on top and no visible droplets standing apart in it.
- It clings: coating what it is put on and holding a line, rather than running off and splitting into a puddle at the plate’s edge.
- It survives standing: minutes later there is no ring of weeping liquid underneath and no film of fat breaking out on the surface.
Where it goes wrong The fat went in faster than the shear could break it up, or the temperature drifted out of the range the method needs: it breaks into grease over a thin liquid, and whisking the broken thing harder does nothing. The rescue is a fresh base, with the broken sauce worked into it slowly, as if it were the fat.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Fino or Manzanilla Sherry
- Also Right
- Muscadet or dry Riesling
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with lemon
Salt-cured fish wants a bone-dry, saline partner: Sherry and Atlantic whites answer the cure without fighting it.
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