Acidity: the great cook’s secret weapon

Fish and lemon. Chips and vinegar. Cheese and pickle. These pairings are so well known that we tend not to analyse why they work – how the refreshing acidity of one neutralises the richness, fattiness or oiliness of the other. As a result, the important part acidity plays in making food taste great often gets overlooked when we’re in the kitchen. But in the same way a good cook will always season to taste with salt at the beginning, during and end of making a dish, an even better one will pay just as much attention to the acidity present.

The thing we like the most about playing with acidity in cooking is that it’s never just acid you’re adding to a dish. There’s always an added flavour too, usually accompanied by sweetness or saltiness. In the same way that miso, cheese, olives and bacon can make dishes salty in a more complex and flavoursome way than just using salt, you can use vinegars, wine, citrus juice or pickles to add acidity with added benefits.

When to add acidity

If you’re making something like a ceviche, you’re going to want a lot more acidity than you would in something like a mac and cheese, so there’s no universal approach. A good rule of thumb is to wait until you’re tasting something you’re cooking and feel like something’s missing or it’s not quite ‘there’ in terms of flavour. This usually means it either needs more salt (which makes the flavours of ingredients more prominent) or, more likely, a dash of acid (which adds brightness and can balance everything out).

Look beyond citrus A squeeze of lemon is a beautiful thing – but it’s generally only useful for adding at the end of cooking. In the world of tasty tangy liquids there are many that can be added earlier on in the cooking process – ones that give more of a background hum of acidity rather than a bright final burst.

Acids to try

1. Vinegars

These are woefully underused in everyday cooking. Decades of dousing chips with malt vinegar have made us think it’s something to be added as we eat, but vinegar shows its prowess when used as a cooking ingredient. A splash of red wine vinegar in a tomato sauce, a dash of cider vinegar to deglaze a pan or a drizzle of balsamic before a tray of veg goes into the oven transforms flat, one-dimensional dishes into something far more complex.

2. Pickles

Acidity doesn’t have to be added to dishes in liquid form. Pickles such as gherkins, capers and onions create little pockets of salty acidity which, when you bite into them, offer an intense explosion of sourness. This is especially useful when you want to create contrast; your rich, creamy sauce could be studded with capers, providing little ‘pops’ of acidity instead of upping the overall acidity of the sauce itself (which something like citrus juice or vinegar would).

3. Dairy

Something we usually think of as soothing, such as dairy, can add acidity if it’s fermented. Yogurt, crème fraîche, buttermilk, soured cream and some (but not all) cheeses are acidic and can add their characteristic tang.

Top tip

If you’re making a sau ce – be it tomato, cream, onion or stock-based – add a splash of vinegar before reducing it. You won’t taste the vinegar by the time it’s ready, but that hint of acidity will brighten and lighten all the other flavours in there, creating balance.

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Tips from the expert team at delicious. magazine. The latest issue is on sale now. Visit deliciousmagazine.co.uk for more tips, recipes and step-by-step techniques. Follow on social media @deliciousmag