If you've ever cut beets, you know how easily their juices flow, often staining your hands maroon. Naturally, they impart their color and sweet, savory flavors into the canning liquid. While a sugary recipe will enhance existing sweetness, a briny liquid balances the beets' natural sweetness and emphasizes earthiness. Either way, this leftover beet juice will make for a colorful and flavorful salad dressing that can easily boost complexity.
For a meal that fully embodies the gifts of summer, there is little better than a tomato salad. Fresh from the garden, fragrant tomatoes picked at the height of the season don't need much else to become a lovely salad, as this two-ingredient tomato and onion salad recipe proves. But if you really want to take your tomato salad to the next level, cookbook author Justine Doiron suggests that a little sweetness is exactly what you're looking for.
Butter and salt aim to enhance corn's rich taste, but lemon juice is an ingredient that really makes the vegetable stand out. The citrus adds a zesty quality to corn, brightening the juicy kernels. Lemon's tart taste has an undercurrent of sweetness to it, so it doesn't reduce corn's honeyed flavor. Instead, it enhances it while providing the veggie with an acidic boost.
After a brief interruption due to feeling ill on-air, Keith Hernandez humorously blamed vinaigrette dressing, sparking a lighthearted discussion with Gary Cohen during the broadcast.