I’ve been cooking a lot more this year. I don’t eat a ton of fish but I picked up some frozen breaded filets at Costco but they didn’t have any tartar sauce, which I thought was odd. Later I thought, hold it, all tartar sauce is is mayonnaise mixed with a few other ingredients. Now that I think about it, why did I ever buy tartar sauce?
Making your own tartar sauce is easy, tastes better, and is potentially healthier (if you choose) for a number of reasons.
Just for the record, you may have thought, like I did, that cream of tartar must be an ingredient of tartar sauce. But it is not, and while these two things may have similar names, they are totally unrelated.
Here are the two main ingredients in tartar sauce, and even if you use only these two ingredients you would technically have a tartar sauce.
- Mayonnaise
- You can use whatever kind of mayonnaise you like, regular, light, low fat, or even homemade. Here’s an opportunity to save some calories. I personally use light mayonnaise. Since there are other flavorful ingredients in tartar sauce, it almost doesn’t matter.
- Pickles
- Use whatever you have that you normally keep in the fridge, there’s no point in buying special pickles for tartar sauce. In fact, one rule of tartar sauce is that you should almost always be able to make it without a trip to the store. Some recipes recommend sweet relish or something like that. Don’t fall for it, use whatever pickles you like best. I use the Clausen dill pickles that I like to eat plain and I always have around.
I’ll get to the rest of the ingredients in a second, but to get your base sauce throw some mayonnaise in a small mixing bowl. Maybe a quarter cup per person. Then try to imagine how much pickle would be right to mix into that. You’ll probably have to experiment with this, but a good way to start is to chop the pickles then add a little bit at a time between mixing and stop adding pickles when it looks right. The pickles are certainly about flavor, but they’re also about texture. Since we can adjust the flavor with other ingredients, it’s okay to worry mostly about texture and how the tartar sauce looks with the pickles at this point. You will probably use less pickle than you expect. If you want to be able to recreate it, go ahead and measure things, but I don’t. My tartar sauce will probably come out slightly different every time.
Chopping the pickles is the hardest part of making tartar sauce, which means it isn’t very hard. However, you will want to chop them smaller than you’ve ever chopping anything before, at least if you’re a novice cook like me. So this is a good chance to learn to delicately chop. I only use about a quarter of a pickle anyway, so take your time. You’ll probably chop the pieces too big the first time, and you’ll learn for the next times. My pieces are less than 3mm square, which still adds texture but doesn’t make the sauce chunky would make it difficult for dipping. Having said that, there’s no wrong answer here, do whatever you like best. You’ll learn a lot from your first batch.
As for other ingredients, this is where you can get creative. If you look up tartar sauce recipes on Google you will find all sorts of ideas. Ignore the recipes, just look at the ingredients.
My favorites:
- Salt
- This is a pretty important ingredient, we’ll talk more about it when we talk about overall flavor next.
- Pepper
- This one’s also pretty important.
- Lemon Juice or Vinegar
I use lemon juice, but either will do. This serves two important purposes, the first of which is to add some tang. Even if you aren’t thinking you want “tangy” tartar sauce you still want this because the tartar sauce will be too bland without it. It won’t necessarily make your sauce taste “tangy”, mine doesn’t.
The other important purpose of lemon juice is to thin the sauce a little bit. With just mayonnaise the sauce will be way too thick and not very dip-able.
- Garlic Powder
- This one’s sort of obvious. Garlic is good in everything, right? Well, mostly.
- Parsley
- This will add some really nice color and some flavor to the sauce. Recipes always recommend fresh, but a sauce is a perfect place for dried parsley because it will hydrate it, so I wouldn’t worry about using fresh parsley unless you happen to have some.
Other interesting ingredients I’ve seen are capers, anchovies, green onions, and chives. There are many others and there’s really no wrong answer as long as you like it.
Flavor. The reason we have tartar sauce is to add flavor and a little smoothness. Usually tartar sauce is pretty bland. Have you ever had the experience where you want to put about a tablespoon of tartar sauce on each bite of fish? This is because the tartar sauce is bland, and it’s a regular occurrence. This is the best part of making your own tartar sauce, you can finally break the cycle of blandness.
You want your tartar sauce to be flavorful enough that you would not want to eat it plain. Just like salt, you wouldn’t want to eat it plain, but you love to put it on things. So go ahead and add extra salt to your tartar sauce. No need to go to extremes, but while tasting your sauce by itself for flavor, your reaction should be “oh, that’s a little too salty” which will make it perfect when it’s added to the actual fish.
This is also a great way to save calories. The main ingredient of tartar sauce is mayonnaise, so we need to be careful. One way to reduce our total mayonnaise intake is to need less of it. Adding plenty of flavor to the sauce will help a lot. I think you’ll be surprised because with a flavorful sauce you’ll require much less of it than you ever have before, and you’ll enjoy the actual fish more too. But don’t worry, you’ll still get all the pleasure that tartar sauce brings, and more than ever before.
Good luck!