Condiment - Tag - vo.rs

Tahini Sauce: The Ratio, the Method, the Variations

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0000

If I could keep only one sauce in my fridge, it would be this. Tahini sauce — sesame paste loosened with lemon, garlic and water — is the quiet workhorse of the Levantine kitchen, and it improves almost anything it touches. Roast vegetables, grilled meat, falafel, a baked sweet potato, a bowl of rice and chickpeas: drizzle this over and dinner is suddenly finished, savoury and creamy with a gentle bitterness that keeps you coming back. It takes five minutes, needs no cooking, and the technique is the whole secret.

Quick Kimchi (Mak-kimchi): Fermented in Two Days

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:00:00 +0000

There is a kind of kimchi for high days and holidays, and a kind for Tuesday. This is the Tuesday one. Mak-kimchi — mak roughly meaning “carelessly” or “roughly” — is the everyday version that skips the whole-cabbage theatre. You chop everything into bite-sized pieces, salt it, dress it, and pack it away. No fermenting crock buried in the garden, no waiting a month to taste your work. Two days at room temperature and you have something bright, sour and alive that will keep improving in the fridge for weeks.

Gremolata: The Three-Ingredient Garnish That Lifts Everything

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Some of the best things in cooking are almost embarrassingly simple, and gremolata is near the top of that list. Three ingredients, a board, a sharp knife, and ten minutes; that is all it takes to transform a dish from good to genuinely exciting. Parsley, lemon zest and garlic, chopped together until fragrant and bright, then scattered over the top of something rich just before serving. It cuts through fat, wakes up flavour, and adds a jolt of freshness that nothing else quite manages. My one small twist is a little orange zest alongside the lemon, for a deeper, rounder citrus lift.

Chilli Oil with Crispy Shallots and Sichuan Peppercorn

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Once you make your own chilli oil, the shop-bought jars start to look a bit sad. This one has everything: deep red heat from the chilli, the tingling, lip-buzzing numbness of Sichuan peppercorn, savoury depth from soy, and the thing that makes it truly addictive, a tangle of crispy fried shallots and garlic folded right through. Spoon it over noodles, dumplings, fried eggs, rice, roast vegetables, or honestly anything that needs waking up. The crispy shallots are my one small twist, and they turn a good chilli oil into one you will guard jealously.

Labneh from Scratch: Strained Yoghurt, Olive Oil, Za'atar

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Labneh is one of those small kitchen miracles that feels like cheating. You take a tub of yoghurt, add salt, hang it in a cloth in the fridge overnight, and wake up to something thick, tangy and spreadable that tastes far more luxurious than the work involved. Spread it in a bowl, swirl the surface, pour on good olive oil and a generous scatter of za’atar, and you have a centrepiece for a mezze table or the best thing to put on toast all week. My one small twist is a little lemon zest stirred in before straining, which sharpens the freshness beautifully.

Zhug: The Green Yemeni Hot Sauce That Goes on Everything

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Some condiments are polite. Zhug is not. It is a fistful of coriander, a handful of green chillies and enough garlic to clear a room, blitzed into a rough, electric-green paste that tastes like sunshine and arson in the best possible way. I made it for the first time to go alongside some grilled lamb and ended up putting it on everything I ate for the following week — eggs, cheese on toast, roast potatoes, a bowl of plain rice that suddenly didn’t taste plain at all.

Fermented Hot Sauce with Habanero and Garlic

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Wear gloves. I am opening with that because every fermented hot sauce story should, and because I learned the hard way that habanero oils do not care about your plans for the rest of the day. With that out of the way: this is the condiment that turned me from someone who owned seven half-finished bottles of shop hot sauce into someone who makes one bottle that beats all of them.

Quick Pickled Red Onions (Three Flavour Variations)

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

There is a particular kind of magic to a jar of bright pink pickled onions in the fridge. They cost almost nothing, take ten minutes, and yet they make you look like someone who has their life together. A taco, a fried egg on toast, a sad supermarket sandwich, a bowl of leftover rice — all of them go from “fine” to “actually rather good” the moment you drape over a tangle of these. They are the closest thing I have to a culinary cheat code.

Preserved Lemons: Two Ingredients, Four Weeks, a Year of Flavour

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

There is a particular kind of cooking magic that asks almost nothing of you and pays out for the better part of a year. Preserved lemons are the purest example I know. Two ingredients — lemons and salt — go into a jar, and four weeks later you have a condiment that makes you look like you know exactly what you are doing in the kitchen, even on a Tuesday when you absolutely do not.