Start making your own: dressing, then mayonnaise
The fastest way to learn what you actually like is to make something small, taste it, change one thing, and taste it again. A vinaigrette is the shortest version of that loop in all of cooking.
Why a salad dressing
It is humble, and that is exactly the point.
It costs pennies. If you ruin it you have lost some oil and a spoonful of vinegar. Nobody has ever been nervous about a vinaigrette.
It takes three minutes, so you can make it twice in a row and taste the difference while the first one is still in your mouth. Almost nothing else in cooking gives you feedback that fast.
There is no heat. Nothing is happening that you cannot see, undo or correct. You can taste at every single step, which you cannot do with a braise or a bake.
It is a real base. The same structure underneath a vinaigrette is underneath a marinade, a pan sauce, a glaze and a dip. Learn it once and four other things stop being mysterious.
And you will immediately taste that yours is better, because bottled dressing is built to survive a year on a shelf and yours is built for tonight.
The base is the base
A vinaigrette is fat, acid, salt and something to hold it together.
Three parts oil to one part acid is where people start, and it is a fine place to start and a poor place to stop. My own dressings run closer to 2:1, because I like them sharp and because the greens are bland and the dressing has to carry them. Yours will be somewhere, and the only way to find out where is to make it three times.
The emulsifier is the trick. Oil and vinegar do not mix; something has to hold them together. Mustard is the usual answer and the easiest. Honey helps. Egg yolk is the strongest of all, which is where mayonnaise comes in below.
The method matters less than people say. Whisk, jar, blender: all fine. Put everything except the oil in first, mix it until the salt dissolves and the mustard is smooth, then add the oil slowly while moving. That is it.
Make it three times
This is the actual exercise, and it takes fifteen minutes.
Batch one, the baseline. 3 parts oil, 1 part red wine vinegar, a teaspoon of Dijon, a pinch of salt. Taste it on a leaf of lettuce, not off a spoon; a dressing tastes completely different on a spoon.
Batch two, change one thing. Take it to 2 parts oil to 1 acid. Taste it on a leaf again. Sharper, more alive, possibly too much. Now you know which direction you like, and you know it from your own mouth rather than from a recipe.
Batch three, change something else. Swap the vinegar for lemon. Or add honey. Or add a grated garlic clove. One change, taste, decide.
At the end of fifteen minutes you know more about your own palate than a year of following recipes will teach you, because every one of those recipes was built for somebody else's mouth.
The five levers
Once you have the base, these are the only things you are ever adjusting.
Acid: how sharp it is. Vinegar is sharper than citrus; red wine is sharper than rice vinegar. Too little and it tastes flat and greasy.
Salt: how much anything tastes of anything. Almost every flat dressing needs salt before it needs another idea. Soy or tamari can do this job and bring savory depth with it.
Fat: how it coats and how it carries. More oil is rounder and softer; less is brighter and more aggressive.
Sweet: honey, maple, a little sugar. It is not there to make it sweet, it is there to take the edge off the acid. A quarter teaspoon changes a dressing more than you would expect.
Aromatics: garlic, shallot, herbs, mustard, pepper, chile. The personality. Grate garlic rather than chopping it so it disappears into the whole thing rather than turning up in bites.
Adjust one at a time. Change three and you have learned nothing, which is the same rule as everywhere else on this site.
Then: mayonnaise
Mayonnaise is the next step because it is the same idea with the emulsion turned all the way up, and because making it once permanently changes how you think about it.
It is egg yolk, oil, acid and salt. That is all. The yolk holds an astonishing amount of oil in suspension if you add it slowly, and what you get is thick, pale, and tastes like actual food rather than like a jar.
The easy method, which works every time: a whole egg, a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar, a teaspoon of mustard, a good pinch of salt and a cup of neutral oil, all in a narrow jar. Put an immersion blender at the very bottom, turn it on, and do not move it for ten seconds. Then raise it slowly. It emulsifies from the bottom up and it takes about thirty seconds.
The classic method is a yolk in a bowl, whisking while you add oil a few drops at a time at first, then in a thin stream. It works and it teaches you what is happening, and it takes five minutes and a sore arm.
If it breaks: start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and whisk the broken mixture into it slowly, as though it were the oil. It comes back. Nothing is lost, which is another reason this is a good place to learn.
Then it stops being mayonnaise and starts being yours. Add a grated garlic clove and it is aioli. Add chipotle in adobo. Add lime and cilantro. Add miso. It is a base, and the whole point of learning a base is what you build on it.
On raw egg: use a fresh one, keep it cold, and if you are cooking for someone pregnant, very young, very old or unwell, use pasteurized eggs. This is the one caution on the page.
Where this goes next
Once dressing and mayonnaise feel obvious, the same instinct applies to things you have always bought:
- A spice blend, which is just proportions, and yours will be fresher
- Compound butter, which is butter and anything, and takes two minutes
- A quick pickle, vinegar, water, salt, sugar, hot, poured over
- A pan sauce, which is the vinaigrette lesson applied to what is left in the pan
- Stock, which is only time
- Bread, which is the largest step on this list and the most satisfying
None of those is hard. They are all the same move: understand what the base is doing, then change one thing and taste it.
The actual lesson
Recipes are somebody else's answer. They are useful, and this whole site is full of them, and every one of them was tuned to a particular palate in a particular kitchen.
The point of starting with a dressing is that it is the cheapest possible place to find out what your answer is. Three minutes, a few cents, no heat and no risk. And once you have done it with a vinaigrette, you will start doing it with everything else without noticing.