Transform Your Picnic Salad With Cocktail Bitters
Bitters are used (almost entirely) to complete the flavor of cocktails by adding subtle but much needed bitter herbal notes. Unless you are a fan of bitters and sodas, you rarely get a taste of the bitters themselves; they just improve the taste of other things.
This is true for cocktails, and it is also, oddly enough, true for picnic salads, especially potato salad, pasta salad, and (arguably more obvious) fruit salad. For mayonnaise-based situations, bitters add their characteristic botanical flavor, creating volume and reducing the richness of a single note, but without the flavor of gentian root. The Angostura bottle offers a few drops per cup of mayonnaise or dressing, but I’ve doubled that amount as mayonnaise tends to muffle other flavors. Start with a couple of drops of bitterness per cup of lettuce , not mayonnaise, and then build up to your liking. For fruit salads – or even green ones – you won’t need that much because you won’t have mayonnaise to fight with. Start with a cup of vinaigrette and add a couple of drops to the dressing, flavor it, and add more if desired. Your salads will instantly become more sophisticated and no one can guess your secret ingredient. (If they do, be aware that you have professional drinkers and make a note so they are not dehydrated.)