Dress Your Salad With Spanish Romesco Sauce For A Tangy Twist

Salad is an underrated food, with many people leaving it as a side dish or skipping it altogether. However, with interesting ingredients, some fun seasoning, and flavorful dressing, you can actually turn your salad into a delicious meal that you won't want to miss.

One way of amping up your salad is to dress it with a Spanish romesco sauce, sometimes called Spanish ketchup. This tangy sauce is made primarily of nuts, tomatoes, roasted red peppers, and vinegar that are blended together into a chunky condiment. Although it's usually spread on bread or paired with proteins, it works great as a salad dressing, too. When you add it to your salad, you get a unique sour flavor that adds some fun-tasting notes to your salad. With that said, here's exactly what you need to know about this sour Spanish sauce and why it pairs so well with your salads in the first place.

Read more: 14 Homemade Salad Dressing Mistakes You're Making

What Is Spanish Romesco Sauce And Why Does It Pair So Well With Salad?

Romesco sauce is a tangy sauce that hails from the province of Catalonia in Spain, although the exact date it was created is a bit murky. Traditionally, Spanish romesco sauce is often paired with grilled vegetables, although it's also frequently served with fish and chicken. As a result, it can work great on salads that contain either of these proteins or just with fresh veggies. What's more, romesco sauce also works well spread on grilled bread. Adding it to a salad and throwing in a few crunchy croutons can be a great way to mimic this flavor profile for a great-tasting salad. Or, you can just pair it with a pasta salad to get the same carby combo with a twist.

The reason why romesco sauce is such a great addition to your salads is partly thanks to its versatility. This sauce also has the added benefit of smoky, jammy flavors that can liven up the more subtle, watery taste of fresh greens or the mellow flavor of bread and carbs. Plus, it's quick and easy to prepare, making it a fast topping for your salad when you don't have any vinaigrettes or dressings hanging around to use.

Romesco Sauce Variations To Know About

While a classic romesco sauce recipe works well as a salad topping, you don't have to stick with what everyone else is doing if you want to step up your salad game. Instead, you can get creative and play around with variations on the classic sauce. One such variation you can implement is to swap out the almonds in your romesco sauce for hazelnuts. Hazelnuts are much more buttery than almonds, giving a richer flavor and reducing the bitterness of your sauce.

Another variation you can use is to play around with the type of vinegar in the sauce. Some recipes call for red wine vinegar while others insist upon sherry vinegar. However, if you don't have either of these on hand, you can always just opt for apple cider vinegar. The flavor will change slightly, but that just means you can figure out which of these sour additives suits your taste buds.

Finally, you can always bypass the typical roasted red pepper romesco sauce and make a green romesco sauce instead. Green romesco sauce uses roasted green bell peppers and poblano chilis to give this traditionally red sauce a totally different color (and flavor). Whichever variation you go for, all of them serve as a great new condiment that's perfect for taking any kind of salad to the next level.

Read the original article on Daily Meal.