Ruined balsamic salad dressing, how to recover

salad-dressingvinegar

My favorite balsamic salad dressing seems to have been discontinued, so I decided to make my own. In doing so I added far, far too much xanthan gum and am now left with 350ml of oily herbed balsamic gel. I tried adding oil to thin it out, but of course had no luck. I have not yet tried an immersion blender (it's too late at night here to run it).

How can I recover from this, either moving ahead with the salad dressing or finding an alternate use for the gel, or should I just cut my losses and start over?

Best Answer

Well, adding more of everything but xanthan gum would of course have the effect of diluting the xanthan gum. The problem is, it's possible that you used way, way too much xanthan gum (easy to do, the amount you need to slightly thicken a dressing is minuscule), so unless you've got a few 50-gallon drums of balsamic vinegar lying around, I wouldn't advise that you go that route. Instead, I'd suggest that you make a new dressing with no xanthan gum, then add the old dressing a bit at a time until you like the result.

As for finding an alternate use for (the rest of) your balsamic xanthan slime: I wouldn't. Xanthan gum is texturally quite unpleasant except at very low concentrations.