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Apr 14, 2024

Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette, Make This Dressing

dressings and sauces Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing is a subtly spicy version of your standard balsamic vinaigrette. It is the perfect balance of sweet, heat, and tang, which makes it an

dressings and sauces

Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing is a subtly spicy version of your standard balsamic vinaigrette. It is the perfect balance of sweet, heat, and tang, which makes it an especially great dressing for salads with fruit, including tomatoes! With only a few ingredients, this dressing is also fast and easy to make. Shall we?

Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette is:

Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette has a few ingredients, most of which you probably have in your pantry, and if you don't already have balsamic vinegar, this dressing is the best reason to add it to your cart on your net grocery run!

For this Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette recipe, you will need:

You may also need a few tablespoons of filtered water to thin out the dressing to a consistency that you like.

Balsamic vinegar is a natural vinegar made from grapes, which puts it in the same family as red wine vinegar, white wine vinegar, and other wine vinegars, though balsamic vinegar is truly in a class of its own.

Balsamic vinegar starts as grape "must," which is all the juice, seeds, and even stems of crushed grapes. The must gets reduced down by boiling, then naturally occurring bacteria ferments the reduced grape must into alcohol in the same kind of process that makes wine. A second fermentation converts the alcohol into acetic acid, which is what makes the fermented juice into balsamic vinegar.

What sets balsamic vinegar apart from other vinegars and distinguishes balsamic vinegars from one another is the aging process that follows fermentation, along with a few other key parameters.

Save the super-luxe Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale, which is only produced in Modena, Italy and aged for a minimum 12 years, for scenarios in which the balsamic vinegar is its own ingredient, e.g. drizzled over fresh berries, ice cream, aged cheese, or even sipped straight.

For salad dressings like this Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette, use a commercial-grade balsamic vinegar, which has higher acidity suitable for dressing, and is more affordable. Generally, a balsamic vinegar off the grocery store shelf in the $12-$20 range will work. Anything lower in price may not be balsamic vinegar at all, but a regular wine vinegar cut with sweetener and caramel coloring (which you could just do yourself at home then).

This balsamic vinegar was a gift and is very good.

While there are pre-made products out there called "hot honey," you don't need to use hot honey specifically for this recipe. We are essentially making our own "hot honey" with honey and crushed red pepper in the dressing, minus the step of straining out the crushed pepper bits.

Put all of the ingredients in a blender or food processor, process, and voila, you've got Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette.

Alternative method: Put all of the ingredients in a mason jar with an air-tight lid and shake vigorously until emulsified.

If desired, add water 1 tablespoon at a time until you get the consistency you like for a vinaigrette-style dressing. I like my vinaigrettes to be fairly thin, so I use 2 tablespoons water.

Taste and add more apple cider vinegar for acid, honey for sweetness, and/or salt.

Hint: leave a useful hint here, like let the grill run for 4-5 minutes to burn off any remnants, then clean it. I like to use this bristle-free barbecue brush (affiliate link) for cleaning the grill.

Black pepper is absent from this dressing recipe, and most other dressing recipes on this site. Unlike salt, which has no flavor itself, but greatly enhances the flavor of other ingredients, black pepper has its own distinct flavor. It is a spice that should be thoughtfully added to recipes when needed. Treat black pepper as an optional table condiment that people can add to their final dish if they want, rather than an automatic, somewhat mindless, addition during cooking to a recipe.

Here are a few subs to fill in any gaps you might inadvertently have in your pantry, or fit into any dietary restrictions:

You don't need any special equipment to make Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette. You can simply use a knife and cutting board to mince the garlic, and a bowl to mix the ingredients. However, that doesn't mean there are a couple of gadgets and tools that might make it even easier than it already is.

Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette is absolutely a dressing you can and should prepare in advance. In fact, make double the amount in the recipe—which will be about the same as what you get in a store-bought bottle—and keep it in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to one week. As if you won't drink it all up before a week.

This dressing can be frozen and will be ok when thawed, but why when it's so easy to shake together on the fly?

Use Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette as a go-to dressing for any salad. It can lightly dress delicate baby lettuces if you thin it out enough when you make it, as well as add big flavor to sturdier greens like Romaine lettuce, kale and roasted vegetables.

Even though I use Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette year-round, I make a special effort to keep it on hand in the Summer because, well, it just matches the hot summer season. More importantly, once Summer hits, Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette is a FANTASTIC dressing to keep in your refrigerator throughout the week to drizzle over meals that don't require any cooking. It will make it easier to throw together a no-cook salad for a quick meal on the busiest days.

Try Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette on these salads:

If you have a hyper-fixation problem when it comes to foods like I do, then once you make this Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette, you will use it on everything. I believe in you.

If you're here looking for any and all manner of tart tangy sweet salty umami dressings, here are a few more that are on heavy rotation in this kitchen:

Balsamic vinegar is high in acid, which means it sort of just preserves itself and technically, can last "forever," or at least for a very very long time, even beyond a printed expiration date. Bottles of balsamic vinegar sold in stores are printed with expiration dates between 2-5 years after the production date because the government requires an expiration date.

No, you do not have to refrigerate balsamic vinegar. Just keep the bottle in a cool, dark place, definitely out of direct sunlight! However, you do have to refrigerate Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette!

For this dressing, you can substitute just about any vinegar for the balsamic vinegar 1:1, and the closest substitute would be red wine vinegar, plus extra honey to account for the natural sweetness of balsamic vinegar. If you want the umami that comes from aging balsamic vinegar, add a few drops of soy sauce. Of course, it will no longer be "Hot Honey Balsamic Vinaigrette"; it will be "Hot Honey and Whatever Kind of Vinegar You Use Vinaigrette."

No, you do not need actual "hot honey," which is a store-bought honey that's already infused with hot chile peppers. This recipe uses regular, natural honey and crushed red chiles separately.

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