Ina Garten Uses This Pantry Staple To Enhance The Sweetness Of Her Corn Salad

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These days, Mexican-style corn salads like elote en vaso seem to be all the rage. Back in the '90s, though, Ina Garten was making a corn salad that was meant to be sweet rather than spicy. Her recipe for fresh corn salad, published in her 1999 opus "The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook," not only includes the eponymous ingredient, which is fairly sweet as vegetables go, but also features another ingredient meant to intensify this flavor: cider vinegar.

Cider vinegar is typically made from fermented apples, which have a high amount of sugar. The resulting product, while it may not have as many magical health-giving properties as influencers claim, does have a rather sweet and markedly apple-y flavor as well as the typical tang you'd expect from vinegar. Garten found that its sweetness made the fresh corn taste better, so she mixed it with olive oil to dress her simple salad made from corn kernels, diced red onion, and fresh basil. This recipe has gotten high marks from people posting their ratings on the Food Network website, although one cook suggested that you can make the salad even sweeter by roasting the corn rather than boiling it as Garten did.

Cider vinegar makes a great addition to corn salad, whether from Garten's recipe or another one, but it's not a must-have if you really don't care for an apple-flavored dressing. Several Food Network fans mentioned making Garten's salad with wine vinegar and seemed satisfied with the results, but wine vinegar typically isn't as sweet as cider vinegar. However, there are several other vinegars known for their sweetness that will allow you to enjoy a sweet, yet non-apple-y tasting, salad.

One such item is rice vinegar (which is the same thing as rice wine vinegar, just as cider vinegar is the same thing as apple cider vinegar). It's especially sweet if you opt for the seasoned kind, since the seasonings typically include sugar. Balsamic vinegar can be sweet enough to use as an ice cream topping, while cane vinegar is actually made out of sugar cane juice. As might be expected, this Filipino staple is fairly sweet. There's even vinegar made from honey, and it, too, is on the sweeter side. (Confusing for flies, though, since if you catch more of these with honey than vinegar, how are they supposed to react when these disparate ingredients merge?)