{"id":984,"date":"2009-05-06T06:46:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-06T06:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elitemporaryblog.wordpress.com\/2009\/05\/06\/something-called-sauce-gribiche"},"modified":"2016-02-19T01:00:56","modified_gmt":"2016-02-19T06:00:56","slug":"something-called-sauce-gribiche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orangette.net\/2009\/05\/something-called-sauce-gribiche\/","title":{"rendered":"Something called sauce gribiche"},"content":{"rendered":"

About five years ago, I think it was, I went out to dinner with my friend Keaton and ate something called sauce gribiche<\/span>. I had never heard of it before, but it was a kind of coarse vinaigrette, with chopped cornichons and capers and hard-boiled eggs, and it was served over asparagus. I don\u2019t know why I remember it so clearly, aside from the fact that I dripped some of it onto my pants, but ever since, I\u2019ve thought about it sometimes, usually when I\u2019m supposed to be thinking about more important things, and I\u2019ve wanted to try making it. It took me a while, as you can see, but yesterday, I finally did. Twice.<\/p>\n

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\nThe thing is, as I learned while tearing my hair out, there is no one sauce gribiche. Its origins are almost certainly French, but from there, it gets tricky. Look in one book, and you\u2019ll be told – very authoritatively, of course – that it\u2019s a mayonnaise with pickles and herbs, a close cousin of tartar sauce. Look somewhere else, and you\u2019ll be told that it\u2019s a vinaigrette with parsley and hard-boiled eggs. Apparently, it\u2019s sort of like pizza: to one person, the word means a deep-dish pie with pineapple and Canadian bacon, while to another, it\u2019s a thin crust dotted with fresh mozzarella. Am I right? Has Delancey fitted me with a permanent pair of pizza goggles? I can\u2019t be sure.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I don\u2019t know what a proper sauce gribiche is, if there even is one, but I can tell you that I have now made two different sauces that go by that name. I can also tell you that it was very confusing, because neither tasted like what I had had before, but I liked them both. Either way, I thought you should know about them, because they\u2019re good company for so many springtime foods, like halibut and new potatoes and asparagus, or cold roasted chicken. There is no time like the present to get confused about sauce gribiche.<\/p>\n

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\nThe first specimen up there, in the bowl and on some boiled potatoes, is an adaptation of a recipe from The Zuni Caf\u00e9 Cookbook<\/span><\/a>. It\u2019s essentially a mayonnaise with lots of Dijon mustard, shallots, fresh herbs, and capers, and it starts with a soft-boiled egg. You cook the egg for four minutes, so that the white is set but the yolk is still liquid, and then you mash it in a bowl with mustard and salt. It\u2019s kind of ingenious: when you add olive oil, the yolk binds it to make a mayonnaise, while the white breaks up into little bits and nubs, adding texture to the sauce. To that you add the herbs and other seasonings. We tried spooning ours onto a few boiled potatoes, because that was what we had in the house, and it was nice enough. But when we chopped the rest of the potatoes into chunks, tossed them with more sauce gribiche, and let them sit in the refrigerator overnight, it made a bang-up potato salad, rich but bright, one of the best I\u2019ve ever eaten. It\u2019s bookmark-worthy.<\/p>\n

The second gribiche, which comes from one of the Chez Panisse cookbooks, is more like the one I ate five years ago, a riff on vinaigrette. It\u2019s kicky but sleek, a French translation, sort of, of chimichurri. It\u2019s delicious. It has more herbs than the Zuni method, and its egg gets hard-boiled and chopped, and it calls for a few cornichons, which means that I got to buy a whole jar and eat them while I cooked, a plus in any category. We ate it on some steamed leeks, which I don\u2019t actually recommend – turns out, sauce gribiche isn\u2019t a great fit for oniony things – but when I go to bed tonight, I hope to dream of it spooned onto some blanched asparagus or a plate of leftover roast beef. I can hardly wait.<\/p>\n\n

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Recipe<\/div>\n

Zuni Caf\u00e9\u2019s Four-Minute Egg Gribiche<\/h2>\n

Adapted from The Zuni Caf\u00e9 Cookbook<\/span><\/a><\/h3> \n \n <\/header>\n\n
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