Commercial Salad Dressing

Salad dressing is one of the easiest condiments to make. Shake oil, vinegar and a few seasonings together in a jar and you have a simple vinaigrette that will made lettuce sparkle.

I've posted a few recipes for salad dressings on this blog, including one with beer, a simple honey balsamic dressing, another with walnut oil. Search through the salad recipes for others including citrus, zesty garlic and more.

I recently read the ingredients on a commercial balsamic vinaigrette:

water
soybean oil
balsamic vinegar
white wine vinegar
sugar
salt
spice
maltodextrin
modified food starch
yeast extract
natural flavors (including soy lecithin)
whey
xanthan gum
natural flavor
less than 0.1% sodium benzoate added as a preservative
garlic
onion
caramel color
propylene glycol alginate

This is why I make my own dressings.

Orange juice

I was raving to Jorge about his oranges the other day and how much we enjoy the juice with Sunday brunch. I stop at his stand (across from McGrath, next to the dried beans from Lompoc) every week to load up on grapefruits, oranges, and whatever else he has in season: pomelos, tangelos, limes, blood oranges - all flavorful and organic.

Jorge told me he went to a local restaurant where they used to serve fresh orange juice but the other day they gave him the pre-packaged stuff. The waitress insisted it was fresh juice, but then went into the kitchen and discovered the carton. She said Jorge was the only customer who'd tasted the difference.

Well of course he noticed - he's a citrus afficionado.

But I'm not surprised other people don't. Our niece Tracie swore that her Florida Naturals o.j. tasted just like fresh juice, until she tasted Uncle Larry's fresh-squeezed version.

But the manufacturers of mass-produced orange juice work hard to make their denatured juice taste as real as possible.

First they remove the oxygen so the juice will last for up to a year. Because this process removes the flavor as well, they then add packets of orange flavoring to make it taste like juice again.

According to Food Renegade, these flavorings don't appear on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and orange oil. However, the food scientists take a natural product like orange oil, break it down into its constituent chemicals, and then use just one or two of these chemicals to create the flavor or aroma they want.

"The packs added to juice earmarked for the North American market tend to contain high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice that, juice companies have discovered, Americans favor. Mexicans and Brazilians have a different palate. Flavor packs fabricated for juice geared to these markets therefore highlight different chemicals."

This shouldn't surprise anyone who enjoys a certain brand of o.j. and expects it to always taste the same. Nature is not consistent. Sometimes the juice Larry makes is tarter, sometimes more full-bodied, sometimes very sweet. If you find a food that always tastes the same, suspect some chemical trickery.

Are these chemicals harmful? I don't know. But I do know they're not food.

Hidden Ingredients

One of the reasons I cook my own food is so I can control the ingredients.

Pre-packaged foods (and some herbal teas) contain flavorings - natural and artificial. I avoid artificial flavorings because they're chemicals. I avoid natural flavorings because they can be derived from animals. As a vegetarian I prefer not to eat any part of an animal.

But I hadn't realized the human animal is involved as well.

Mother Jones recently reported that some food additives and supplements are made from human hair.

Human hair has a high percentage of L-cysteine, an amino acid that gives hair its strength. This quality enhances baked goods as well, and many bakeries use dough conditioners containing L-cysteine in their products. (Mother Jones cites Tastykakes, Noah's bagels and Lunchables as products with L-cysteine added.)

L-cysteine is not only found in human hair. It can be extracted from poultry feathers (natural flavoring), or even manufactured in a lab (artificial flavoring). But human hair (natural flavoring) is the cheapest. A lot comes from a temple in India where pilgrims have their heads shaved.

Funnily enough, companies were reluctant to tell Mother Jones whether the L-cysteine in their products was synthetic or made from duck feathers or human hair. Vegans frown on feathers and hair, and Muslim religious authorities have deemed human hair derivatives haram - forbidden. Jewish authorities have determined that L-cysteine is kosher regardless of its source, kosher food expert Rabbi Zushe Blech told Mother Jones.

In the supplement world, L-cysteine is widely touted as an antioxidant. Alacer Corp. wouldn't say which form of L-cysteine is in Emergen-C, but Twinlab told Mother Jones writer Scott Carney that their supplements contain only human hair-derived L-cysteine.

Cajun food maker Zatarain's said it uses the synthetic product to create a "vegetarian chicken flavor" in its Blackened Chicken With Yellow Rice. Carney said he couldn't get an answer from General Mills, Goya Foods, or Orowheat about where their L-Cysteine comes from.

The words "natural flavorings" look so benign on an ingredient label. Who would have imagined what could be hiding behind them?

The world of mass-produced food just gets weirder and weirder.

The Taste of Food

I went to the Staples Center last week to cheer the Montreal Canadiens to victory over the Los Angeles Kings.

Larry got the tickets for Valentine's Day, and they were premier seats on a tier with higher-quality food than the average arena fare.

I ordered a veggie burger. It came on a whole wheat bun. I was impressed until I tasted it.

It was sweet. As in sugary. I have never eaten such a sweet veggie burger in my life. The fries were very salty. Thank goodness for the bitter Sam Adams to balance out the flavors.

Of course, sweet and salty are what I should have expected. Most of the food served to the public riffs on those two flavors. It’s why I eat at home - more diversity of taste.

In the world of cooking there are four primary tastes: sweet, salty, bitter and sour. And a fifth taste described as umami. It’s difficult to define, a savory flavor that gives dry-aged steak, lobster, shiitake mushrooms, soy sauce, parmesan or gruyere that certain something. Dishes that are balanced with an umami component seem to have an extra dimension of flavor.

The veggie burger and fries at the Staples Center did not have umami.

Salt and sugar are the flavors people crave. And in America, the volume is turned way up on what we enjoy: rock music at hockey games, salt in the fries, probably sugar in the soda but I managed to avoid that. We not only supersize the portions, we supersize the taste.

Sweet is a natural human addiction. Breast milk, our first food, is sweet. Herballist Susun Weed says that the plants that nourish us and that we should eat more of taste sweet, whereas the medicinal plants that we should eat less of taste bitter. Of course, sweet greens are different in intensity to the sweet taste that the flavor wizards have created for us in this era of chemical food.

I read an article in The New Yorker (Nov. 23, 2009) about the people who create flavorings for processed foods. They sounded like lovely people, but they were chemically obsessed. They stood in a Riverside, CA, citrus grove and tried to determine which of their laboratory chemicals would replicate the smell of the fresh fruit.

Why not just eat the fresh fruit? The answer is that the food manufacturers make more money selling us chemical-derived food than real food.

And as long as we are addicted to salty and sweet, we will continue to fill their coffers.

Start Me Up

I like the idea of coffee: putting on a pot of coffee before getting to the paperwork; sitting around the kitchen table with cups of coffee.

But I’m not really a coffee drinker. I have gone through phases of coffee addiction and abstention. I’m currently in a phase of the occasional cup with Sunday brunch.

I recently had an americano at the Cafecito Organico stand at the Hollywood Farmers Market. This is an espresso with extra hot water. Apparently it has less caffeine than brewed coffee. It tasted good and warmed my hands in the early morning chill.

Coffee stimulates an adrenaline rush that can be tough on the body. Some people are better off avoiding it. Most can drink it in moderation.

It is a natural food. Coffee beans are roasted, ground and infused with hot water. The grounds are great on the compost heap or sprinkled around acid-loving plants in the garden.

How can that be bad?

But then I see ads for International Coffee and non-dairy creamers, or I stand in Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and see their menu of coffees with powders in them. Have you looked at the ingredients? Corn syrup, flavorings - natural or artificial, they are not food.

In fact, I would argue they’re not coffee. They are chemical-laden milkshakes for grown-ups.

If you drink coffee, make it organic. Your liver has enough work breaking down the chemicals in coffee without adding pesticide and fertilizer residue. Add milk (or soy milk) if desired. Don’t add chemical sweeteners or whiteners. They’re not food; why add more strain to your liver?

If you want sweet flavored coffee, try this recipe from the Mexico the Beautiful cookbook.

Bring 4 cups water to a boil in a saucepan. Lower the heat and add 1/2 cup coarsely ground dark-roasted coffee, 1/2 cup dark brown sugar, a 4-inch piece of cinnamon, 5 whole cloves and the peel from 1/4 orange. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add 1 cup cold water, remove from heat and cover. Let stand for 5 minutes. Strain before serving. It’s not traditional to add milk, but I do.

(Or squeeze a piece of orange zest into your regular mug of coffee, drop the zest in too, and stir in brown sugar and milk to taste. No corn syrup or flavors required.)