Kick Salad Dressing Up A Notch With An Ingredient From Your Bar

We all love a good hack to level up the dishes we prepare at home, whether it's to spoil the fam or to impress the guests. So you'll really want to have this dressing hack up your sleeve — and it lives in a very unlikely place for a salad hack. You'll often find it in your bar, near a bunch of toothpicks and bottles of vermouth, vodka, and gin. Ah, you've guessed it, haven't you? The ingredients for a martini (shaken, not stirred, according to James Bond). And the actual ingredient? Olives. Or, more precisely, the olive brine.

But olive brine is just the leftover preservative of the olives, you might say. On the contrary — olive brine is your secret weapon for next-level salad dressing. The salty brine, infused with rich flavor from the olives, packs a delicious punch to your vinaigrette or creamy salad dressings.

Olives are naturally quite luxurious in taste because of the amino acid glutamate that occurs in them naturally. This richness infuses into the salty brine, delivering a holistically salty, sour, sweet, and slightly bitter (also from the olives) quality. Just a tablespoon or two (taste-test your olive brine first to check its level of saltiness — some are saltier than others) will bring a mysterious umami to your dressing. Your guests won't be able to put their finger on it, but they will drizzle it (then drizzle it a few more times) over their salads.

Olive brine is a clever little ingredient. Its rich and salty flavor lends itself to more than just salad dressings. Add it to marinara to bring out a luxurious depth of flavor to your sauce, then serve with pasta or rice. Or go the whole nine yards and add olive brine to the water you're using to cook your pasta or rice to bulk up the flavor all around. You can even spread that marinara onto a pizza, top with arugula, and enjoy a deeply satisfying slice or two.

Olive brine is also a great replacement for vegetable stock or broth. The savory umami flavor adds the flavor depth that your stock normally would. This is absolutely delicious in vegetable soup to flavor your veggies as they cook up into a hearty meal. Homemade ketchup also benefits from a bit of olive brine, which balances out its sweetness. Or add a bit of brine to your scrambled eggs to give them a slight tang, deepening the richness of the yolks. Hummus also responds well to the addition of olive brine. Substitute half the portion of chickpeas with white beans, then add your olive brine to taste.

Olive brine isn't the full stop for your brine expedition, though. You can also experiment with other brines, like those that preserve pickles, peppers, mixed veg, or even capers.