I was delighted to find, however, that one can buy whole-grain ground mustard which includes both the flour and bran. In this attempt, I substituted that for the powdered mustard I had been using before and doubled the quantity to account for the presence of the mostly flavourless bran.
I made up a batch of the Attempt 5 recipe, let it age a couple of days to allow the flavours to meld, and compared them, initially by tasting small quantities directly from the bottle or dish , and then on iceberg lettuce. Initial evaluation?
First of all, I have new respect for the experts who do comparison tasting of recipes. The power of suggestion is great in the human brain, especially in the deeper, more visceral parts associated with taste and smell. But still, one must judge, so here's a tip of the tongue report.
The difference between my recipe and the Marie's Super to the limited extent of my discernment , is that the French Roquefort cheese I used is more strongly flavoured and more salty than the provenance-unspecified blue cheese used in the Marie's product. The difference is subtle: it's much more obvious when tasting the dressing directly than when served on a salad, and the distinction is more evident when the bit you're tasting contains a chunk of the undiluted blue cheese, not just the sauce.
The whole-grain mustard I used appears to be ground more coarsely than the mustard flour and bran in Marie's, which gives the concoction a slightly speckled appearance kind of like Breyers vanilla ice cream, if you remember that good grief—it appears to still exist ; who'd have guessed? I don't find this at all objectionable, but if you do, substituting finely ground mustard powder should do the trick.
Still, I am an engineer, and attention to detail summons me back to the laboratory or, in this case, the kitchen. The first obvious thing in the taste testing is that the blue cheese used in Marie's is substantially less strongly flavoured and less salty than the Roquefort I used, which can result in ambiguous results in taste testing of chunky recipes until you discover that the integrated taste of a spoonful depends on how many chunks of the straight cheese made it into your mouth.
This is something which one can address only by changing the blue cheese in the recipe. I have laid in a supply of different kinds of blue cheese readily available in Central Europe, and I will taste them and try different recipes based upon them according to my evaluation of their similarity to the blue cheese used in the Marie's recipe. I should observe here that Marie's have recently changed their formulation to jump on the latest U.
The new formula does not stay blended and the taste just isn't the same. If, indeed, the modified Marie's is inferior in flavour, it can't be used as a benchmark against recipes trying to reproduce the original, and since that product is no longer available, direct comparison is impossible.
I suppose we should at least take comfort that Marie's didn't go and add peach fuzz to the goop. A few days after the initial taste testing, I was reading up on blue cheeses in Steven Jenkins's Cheese Primer , where he observes p. For this purpose, any blue cheese, such as Danish Blue, will do, and at one-third to one-fourth of the price. The deep, full, spicy round flavor of Roquefort is denigrated when used in this manner.
It deserves solo billing alongside a salad; then, both tastes are elevated, rather than diminished. Well, if you live in Switzerland, one thing you should never do is denigrate cheese, even if it comes from across the border!
Agur, and Bleu de Bresse. I tasted these and a few others, which weren't even close , and decided the Danish Blue was the closest to the blue cheese used in Marie's, with the St.
Agur in second place, but closer to Roquefort than the Danish Blue. Not only are there fewer calories in the Super, since it's more strongly flavoured, you may end up using less of it to obtain the same blue cheese bite on your salad. With the revised target in mind, I made a batch of what has become my standard recipe modified as indicated at the right.
The only changes were substituting the Danish Blue cheese for Roquefort and using Colman's powdered mustard instead of the ground whole-grain mustard I used before.
The latter was because I noticed the whole-grain resulted in dark specks and a slight crunchiness absent in the prototype. At the same temperature, my recipe was somewhat more thick than Marie's, but both had flecks of blue cheese distributed about equally through the bulk. Unlike my recipe made with Roquefort, which was distinctly more green than Marie's, this batch was just about the same shade of blue. Trying to be as fussy as possible, I noted the following slight differences:.
We are definitely into the domain of fine tuning here. The recipe above, with Danish Blue, makes a better salad dressing than the Roquefort in my estimation, but if you're one of those people who blesses every bite with the sodium ion dispenser, the difference may not be all that apparent.
The difference is apparent only if you taste the dressing directly which can lead to drinking it with a straw, intravenous injection, and even more ignominious compulsions—step back from the brink, while there's still time , and imperceptible when you use it on a salad or as a dip.
Based on further taste testing and adjustments, I arrived at the recipe at the right, which is now my standard; I have made numerous batches of it and find no need for further adjustments. I've deleted the added salt and kept the mustard and garlic powder the same even though the rest of the recipe has been scaled up; they are such minor components of the composite taste that you could probably double them and not notice the difference.
After making this recipe a number of times, I have made a small refinement in the way I combine the ingredients. First, I add the ground mustard and garlic powder to the mixing bowl, then the vinegar and buttermilk. I then stir until the mustard and garlic dissolve in the thin, acidic liquid.
Next, I add the mayonnaise and sour cream, and then blend everything to a smooth consistency. Finally, I add the cheese and chop it up into a mix of finely dispersed bits and larger chunks and finally mix well. I find that two serving spoons do a fine job of chopping and mixing the cheese, the second used for scraping the first when a glob of cheese accumulates on it.
With so much buttermilk in the mix, the result will be somewhat runny when you're done stirring it, but if you leave it in the refrigerator overnight, it will thicken up nicely. Be sure to stir it again before serving.
Like all too many yummy things, this is just about the polar opposite of a low-fat, low-calorie health food. One batch of this stuff based on the g Danish Blue cheese recipe above adds up to almost calories—comparable to the entire daily calorie requirement of a smallish adult, and almost all of it is from fat.
Each tablespoon you glop on your salad rings up about 80 calories on the Eat Watch , so bear in mind that a little goes a long way, and that it's all too easy to transform your healthy garden-fresh salad into an artery-clogging calorie bomb through the liberal application of this creamy concoction.
It is possible to substantially reduce the calories in this recipe by substituting low-fat mayonnaise and sour half-cream for their fat-city congeners. Double-blind taste testing of the regular and reduced calorie versions of both the Marie's products and the SubMarie's approximations presented here would be an interesting experiment for a cuisinerd dinner party. While Attempt 7 is the recipe I have settled on and use routinely, in my estimation any of the recipes from Attempts 5 through 7 produce an excellent salad dressing, and the choice among them is a matter of personal preference.
If you prefer a more pungent and saltier concoction, by all means try the Rouquefort-based Attempt 5. Attempts 6 and 7 both yield a milder flavour I believe the blue cheese in Marie's is more strongly flavoured than Danish Blue, but closer to it than to Roquefort , with Attempt 6 leaning more in the direction of mayonnaise and Attempt 7 toward buttermilk and sour cream.
The mayonnaise I was using in this and most subsequent experiments includes mustard and salt. It also includes vinegar, a detail I neglected to note, adding a substantial amount of vinegar to the mix myself.
Preparation couldn't be simpler. I just throw all the ingredients into a glass casserole dish and then chop up the Roquefort cheese with a metal serving spoon until it's in chunks, then stir everything together. You'll need to scrape the cheese off the sides and bottom of the dish where it tends to accumulate and blend it into the mix.
You may also have to scrape off cheese which has stubbornly stuck to your spoon; a knife makes quick work of this. It is traditional to mix sauces like this with a whisk, but you don't want to do that when dealing with gooey blue cheese and already-thickened mayonnaise and sour cream; you'll end up with a blue cheese baseball bat which is a tedious mess to clean.
You can use an electric mixer, food processor, or blender to mix the ingredients, but it's hard to achieve the right degree of chunkiness in the cheese. If you prefer a completely-mixed creamy salad dressing, however, that's the easy way to go. So how was it? Execrable—the buttermilk and vinegar overwhelmed everything else and the result was a runny, sour mess with forlorn bits of blue cheese swimming in milky fluid. Well, after all, engineering is an art we learn from failure, and reverse engineering is no exception: onward.
This was a big improvement; the result was still a bit thinner than I remember Marie's being, but not at all runny. The blue cheese was well dispersed throughout the dressing, so even sauce without chunks of cheese were well flavoured by the Roquefort. The result still seeming a bit too sour, and my having finally twigged to the fact that the mayonnaise I was using contained vinegar, I decided to halve the amount of vinegar.
This batch was made during a trip to the British Isles, where Roquefort is sold in larger slices, which required adjustments to the other ingredients to compensate. Buttermilk wasn't available, so I did without. Although the buttermilk was missed, the result had a delightfully unctuous consistency and tasted remarkably close to my memory of the real thing, which was quite surprising considering that the second ingredient on the label was missing!
I decided the addition of mustard and garlic was a big improvement and decided to retain them in the recipe. I decided to use this kind of product in subsequent experiments. This batch came out just great in my estimation; it may not be identical to the real thing, but it's close enough for me.
Even if you've well-mixed all of the ingredients initially, it's a good idea to stir the bowl once again after it's been sitting in the frigo for a while; the garlic powder and dry mustard don't immediately release their flavour when you add them to the mostly oily mix, and a second stir after a wait distributes their tang through the mixture. In the next attempt, I made one slight change. For the moment I'm satisfied with this recipe and have made it several times since without modifications.
Mustard bran has little taste of its own, but is a powerful thickening agent, and is presumably used primarily for this purpose. I originally considered it to be a specialised ingredient used in industrial packaged food production, unlikely to be found in supermarkets or in small quantities suitable for home cooking.
I was delighted to find, however, that one can buy whole-grain ground mustard which includes both the flour and bran. In this attempt, I substituted that for the powdered mustard I had been using before and doubled the quantity to account for the presence of the mostly flavourless bran. I made up a batch of the Attempt 5 recipe, let it age a couple of days to allow the flavours to meld, and compared them, initially by tasting small quantities directly from the bottle or dish , and then on iceberg lettuce.
Initial evaluation? First of all, I have new respect for the experts who do comparison tasting of recipes. The power of suggestion is great in the human brain, especially in the deeper, more visceral parts associated with taste and smell. But still, one must judge, so here's a tip of the tongue report. The difference between my recipe and the Marie's Super to the limited extent of my discernment , is that the French Roquefort cheese I used is more strongly flavoured and more salty than the provenance-unspecified blue cheese used in the Marie's product.
The difference is subtle: it's much more obvious when tasting the dressing directly than when served on a salad, and the distinction is more evident when the bit you're tasting contains a chunk of the undiluted blue cheese, not just the sauce. The whole-grain mustard I used appears to be ground more coarsely than the mustard flour and bran in Marie's, which gives the concoction a slightly speckled appearance kind of like Breyers vanilla ice cream, if you remember that good grief—it appears to still exist ; who'd have guessed?
I don't find this at all objectionable, but if you do, substituting finely ground mustard powder should do the trick. Still, I am an engineer, and attention to detail summons me back to the laboratory or, in this case, the kitchen. The first obvious thing in the taste testing is that the blue cheese used in Marie's is substantially less strongly flavoured and less salty than the Roquefort I used, which can result in ambiguous results in taste testing of chunky recipes until you discover that the integrated taste of a spoonful depends on how many chunks of the straight cheese made it into your mouth.
This is something which one can address only by changing the blue cheese in the recipe. I have laid in a supply of different kinds of blue cheese readily available in Central Europe, and I will taste them and try different recipes based upon them according to my evaluation of their similarity to the blue cheese used in the Marie's recipe.
I should observe here that Marie's have recently changed their formulation to jump on the latest U. The new formula does not stay blended and the taste just isn't the same. If, indeed, the modified Marie's is inferior in flavour, it can't be used as a benchmark against recipes trying to reproduce the original, and since that product is no longer available, direct comparison is impossible. I suppose we should at least take comfort that Marie's didn't go and add peach fuzz to the goop.
A few days after the initial taste testing, I was reading up on blue cheeses in Steven Jenkins's Cheese Primer , where he observes p. For this purpose, any blue cheese, such as Danish Blue, will do, and at one-third to one-fourth of the price. The deep, full, spicy round flavor of Roquefort is denigrated when used in this manner.
It deserves solo billing alongside a salad; then, both tastes are elevated, rather than diminished. Well, if you live in Switzerland, one thing you should never do is denigrate cheese, even if it comes from across the border!
Agur, and Bleu de Bresse. I tasted these and a few others, which weren't even close , and decided the Danish Blue was the closest to the blue cheese used in Marie's, with the St. Agur in second place, but closer to Roquefort than the Danish Blue. Not only are there fewer calories in the Super, since it's more strongly flavoured, you may end up using less of it to obtain the same blue cheese bite on your salad. With the revised target in mind, I made a batch of what has become my standard recipe modified as indicated at the right.
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