Catching more customers with vinegar

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan 11, 1993 by Florence Fabricant

The list of luxury products that can highlight a dish and elevate the asking price is a short one. Lobster, oysters, carbmeat, caviar, white and black truffles, smoked salmon, certain wild mushrooms and foie gras are the major contenders.

Ounce for ounce, saffron is breathtakingly expensive, probably more so than even beluga caviar, but it is used sparingly as a seasoning, making the actual quantity in the dish difficult to assess. It's not like a spoonful of caviar sitting on a plate or white truffles shaved generously over pasta.

Balsamic vinegar is another ingredient that should also have a high luxury quotient but does not for two reasons. First of all, the finest quality is rarely used. Even restaurants that serve sauteed fresh foie gras or garnish certain dishes with sturgeon caviar routinely use balsamic vinegar which, in terms of quality, is the equivalent of chopped liver or lumpfish caviar.

About 12 years ago, when word of balsamic vinegar first leaked out of Modena, Italy, where it is said to have originated and where the best is still made, the only balsamic vinegar that was available on the American market was made in industrial fashion, by coloring and flavoring wine vinegar. In the better industrial vinegars, some authentic balsamic vinegar finds its way into the mixture.

Industrial balsamic vinegar can be decent in its coffee color, and its mellow sweetness bears some resemblance to traditional well-aged balsamic vinegar.

But within months the market began to be flooded with increasingly cheaper balsamic vinegars. The result is that the quality now sold in America is mediocre at best. All the excitement over balsamic vinegar led to a greater awareness of it throughout Italy, and inexpensive vinegars also began to show up in regions beyond Emilia-Romagna.

So the Modenese makers of traditional Italian balsamic vinegar formed a consortium and took action, the Italian government made laws and the result is that now there is a kind of balsamic vinegar labelled "aceto balsamico tradizionale," which is vastly different from the run-of-the-mill commercial kind. Another group of producers from Emilia-Romagna also have a consortium with similar rules.

This balsamic vinegar is made in traditional fashion by constantly transferring the vinegar developing from the cooked unfermented must of white wine to successively smaller barrels. The resulting vinegar is dark brown and syrupy, with a sweetness balanced by a rich acidity.

It is sold only in tiny, rounded 100-ml. -- 3.5-ounce --flasks, sealed with an official stamp. At around $100 a bottle, or $30 an ounce, this works out to be less costly than white truffles but dearer than caviar. It is not the stuff of salad dressing. But no chef should even think of serving the classic Modenese fresh strawberries with balsamic vinegar without using the real stuff.

The problem is that the public thinks of balsamic vinegar as something sold in supermarkets for $7 a liter and is thus incapable of appreciating such a delicacy. It doesn't pay for a chef to use genuine balsamic vinegar unless cognoscente are dining.

But just a drizzle of proper balsamic vinegar can glorify certain dishes. A few weeks ago at Le Cirque a group of chefs participated in a dinner to illustrate the uses of traditional balsamic vinegar. The dinner began with a kind of antipasto plate assembled by Michael Romano of Union Square Cafe. It consisted of white beans, an eggplant gratin and some seafood salad dressed with a bit of balsamic vinegar. The vinegar was especially felicitous as a seasoning for the delicate eggplant.

Francesco Antonucci of Remi contributed homemade garganelli, rolled fresh pasta similar in shape to penne, with zucchini, garlic and baisamic vinegar. The vinegar highlighted the other-wise-restraine flavors of the dish.

A warm salad of pheasant and foie gras was simply dressed with traditional balsamic vinegar by Sottha Khunn of Le Cirque. It was delectable even though the wine, a fairly light Carmignano of Capezzana, was incapable of doing it justice.

Mousselike Parmesan "ice cream" splashed with balsamic vinegar was the interesting cheese course created by Marta Pulini of Le Madri. Jacques Torres of Le Cirque elegantly combined a simple blanc mange with strawberries and balsamic vinegar.

But the highlight of the dinner was clearly the use of traditional balsamic vinegar with the foie gras. Yet, ironically, were a dish like this to appear on a menu, it would be the foie gras, not the astronomically expensive vinegar, that could justify a high price or a surcharge.