Garden Herb Salad Dressing Mix

Garden Herb Salad Seasoning from Altes Gewürzamt, green

The Garden Herb Salad Seasoning from Altes Gewürzamt is a finely ground seasoning for leaf lettuce, cucumbers, and potato salad, featuring mustard, parsley, chives, wild garlic, and dill. The mustard flour binds oil and vinegar into a creamy vinaigrette.

Garden Herb Salad Seasoning is the green spice blend from Altes Gewürzamt that brings together nineteen ingredients. Mustard is listed first, followed by powdered sugar, salt, and white pepper, while the bouquet of herbs ranges from parsley and wild garlic to myrtle.

Mustard, wild garlic, and a bouquet of garden herbs

When you open the jar, spring fills the air long before the first lettuce arrives at the table, because an entire garden comes together here at once.

The fact that mustard is the first ingredient listed is the real trick. Mustard flour holds oil and vinegar together, which naturally tend to separate, and the longer the powder is allowed to soak in the vinegar, the creamier the dressing becomes and the less it will separate over the salad later.

After that, it turns green. Parsley, chives, wild garlic, dill, and celery leaves provide five herbal notes, joined by myrtle, a resinous shrub from the Mediterranean. Horseradish and chili add a touch of sharpness in the finish that arrives just when you least expect it.

Paprika and turmeric provide the color; both are high on the list and give the powder its warm tone. You see little of this in a dressing, but it colors a bowl of plain quark immediately.

In vinaigrettes, quark, and butter

Leaf salads, cucumber salad, and lukewarm potato salad take particularly well to this green seasoning from Altes Gewürzamt.

A simple vinaigrette requires three parts oil to one part vinegar and a heaped teaspoon of the seasoning. Add the powder to the vinegar first, let it sit for five minutes, and then whisk in the oil, because dried herbs need liquid before they release their aroma.

Because it is finely ground, the seasoning coats every leaf evenly instead of settling at the bottom of the bowl. Stirred into yogurt or quark, it becomes a dip; kneaded into soft butter, it makes a herb butter for baked potatoes.

A lettuce salad with cream welcomes it just as much as cucumbers with dill, and for a dressing for steamed fish, half a teaspoon stirred into yogurt and lemon is enough. The wild garlic is the signature note by which this seasoning is recognized.

Why white pepper is ground here

White pepper provides a similar kick to black pepper but doesn't leave dark specks in a light vinaigrette. At the very end of the list, fenugreek, coriander, and cumin provide a warm foundation for the green freshness.

Salt is third on the list, so the salad seasoning flavors and salts in one go. Keep this in mind when seasoning, and you will barely need to reach for the salt shaker at the end.

The mixture is finely ground at Altes Gewürzamt in Klingenberg, and they deliberately avoid artificial colors and flavorings. When kept in a tightly sealed jar, the powder remains free-flowing and retains its green color.

For quick cooking, it is worth taking a look at the classics of German cuisine and from there, on to the Altes Gewürzamt.