la.foodblogging

I love sour. I love grape juice. Imagine my joy when I was wandering through Marina Farms and a bottle caught my eye. Sour grape juice!

I tossed the bottle in my cart and began to dream about sipping the tart nectar when I got home. My fiancee wasn’t quite as excited as I was, but when I poured two small glasses to try, she agreed to taste it.

I took a small sip and… dear god, my whole body contorted and I couldn’t stop shaking my head. My face bunched up and the juice grabbed hold of all of my taste buds.

I immediately realized that I had the wrong idea about this juice. My fiancee smelled the glass and said “it smells like doodie, I’m not drinking that”. We found the brains in the relationship.

It turns out that sour grape juice, which is a product of Iran, is used in some persian recipes, similar to when I would normally use lemon juice, or possibly vinegar. This being the case, I did salvage the two glasses by shaking the remaining juice up with some olive oil, mustard, salt, pepper and a little honey to make a delicious, and slightly fruity, salad dressing.

Sour Grape Juice is also known as Verjuice and its great advantage is adding acid without dominating flavours. The juice is made from unripened grapes and sometimes other sour fruits like green or crab apples.

I have about a cup of salad dressing left, as well as about 3/4 of a bottle of the unmolested juice in my fridge. I’m going to try to get creative with it, as far as my fiancee will tolerate.

By Jonah (see more of his posts). Jonah is the founder of la.foodblogging and also created Digesty, a food blog aggregator and Cheww.com, a spam free foodblog search engine.