Continuing with my own Dinners Blog theme, using an ingredient I’ve never used before, but really like the taste of, is sherry vinegar. I’ve started to enjoy decent Spanish sherries over the last year or so and have tasted the samples of reserve sherry vinegar in Borough Market a fair few times, but have never bought any, for some reason.  The reserve sherry vinegar is almost as sweet as balsamic, but has a pleasant sherry aftertaste.

 

Once I’d picked up the sherry vinegar, I started to think I’d make a Spanish themed salad, albeit with english leaves. A clip of The Hairy Bikers using chorizo in a different way gave me the inspiration for what followed.

 

Cut a couple of thick slices of good bread (I used sourdough) and then cut into roughly 50 pence piece sized chunks. Chop some Chorizo into similarly sized chunks, then place the chorizo on the bread. Put the bread with chorizo on in the oven at gas mk 6 and then cook until the chorizo has crisped up (about 5-10 mins at gas mk 6/200C/400F). The juices from the chorizo are absorbed by the bread, producing lovely, crispy croutons, full of the flavour from the chorizo.  

 

Mixing all the leaves plus the chorizo and croutons, I then chucked in a few olives and considered the dressing. I had wanted to use my favourite salad oil, pumpkin seed oil, with the sherry vinegar, but they just didn’t work well together. I then tried a olive oil and then groundnut oil, but these both seemed to remove the sherry aftertaste. In the end, I just settled with dribbling some of the sherry vinegar over the salad, which worked just fine.

I really liked the chorizo croutons and although the Hairy Bikers finely chopped the end product and used it as a topping for fish, I think it worked pretty well, unchopped, in the salad, too.

 

Recipe (1-2):

100g of cured chorizo, preferably bought in one piece

2 thick slices bread

50g Rocket

50g Red Chard

50g Spinach leaves

A few olives

Sherry vinegar to dress