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You Should Be Putting This Sauce on Your Grilled Meat

Sauce on Grilled Meat

Sauce on grilled meat – this is the one you want

Grilled meat is, as we all know by now, a barbecue classic. Warm days and late sunsets send everyone outside to cook their dinner the way our ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors did: over flames. How could you ever improve on that?

The answer is this: Dial that fatty, smoky, charred flavor up to eleven by giving it a saucy counterpart. You need lots of acid, lots of salt, and lots of fresh flavor. You need salsa verde.

In its most classic form, this sauce is a combination of parsley, capers, anchovies, oil, and vinegar. Delightful.

But it’s also a clean-out-the-refrigerator affair, a choose-your-own-adventure of a sauce. If the flavors end up leaning more Latin than Italian, call it chimichurri. If you run out of olive oil and it’s a bit thick and pasty, it can be more of a pesto. It’s summertime: There’s no need to be formal about your grill sauce.

Just make sure you nail the elements below, more or less, and give everything a good buzz in the food processor until you’ve got a good sauce working. (A blender would work, too, or you can just chop the herbs by hand before adding the other ingredients.) Soon you’ll wonder how you ever ate steak without it.

Green stuff
The bulk of your salsa verde will be made up of herbs (that’s the verde). Parsley, basil, and mint are a good combo; cilantro and oregano are good together, too. But really whatever you have that looks a little wilty, a little use-or-toss, should go in the mix: dill, thyme, rosemary (a little goes a long way), sorrel, fennel fronds, kale. You get the picture. Whatever combination of greens you use, you want a big handful’s worth and you want it to be mostly herbs—the less-flavorful greens are just there to bulk up the sauce

Umami
Garlic, most likely. Anchovy paste is nice, too; a good-sized dollop won’t make it taste fishy, just flavorful. If you want to add a briny element, drained capers or chopped olives will do the trick. Add a good-sized pinch of any of these to your sauce.

Oil
Olive, please. It’s just the best tool for the job. You can thin it out with a bit of cooking oil like canola, if you’re concerned about cost. But add a few real decent glugs to the sauce.

Heat
A small pinch of dried red chili flakes is a classic addition, or try a fresh chili pepper. Remove the seeds if you’re sensitive to the heat, or go all out if you dare. Up to you.

Acid
Any manner of vinegar works, although wine vinegar adds a nice roundness. Or citrus juice — lemon, lime — or a combo thereof. And for a touch of pure sunshine, lemon zest really caps things off nicely.

Buzz It
You should have enough wet stuff in your mix for the food processor to make a go of it at this point. Add a couple big pinches of salt and go to town. Then try it. Too muddy-tasting? Add some acid. Too thick? Add oil. It almost certainly will need another pinch of salt.

Get it to where you like it, and then put it on pretty much anything. A word of warning: It does tend to go brown in the refrigerator after a day or two, so use it up quickly. Thankfully, it’s delicious, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

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