Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Half Hour)

Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Half Hour)
This event was on
Tuesday, May 27, 2025 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern
Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.
Question:

What can I use as an alternative to citrus?
— Mary-Jean Palmer
Answer:
So depending on what you're looking for in this, um, you know, if you're looking for the acidity of a citrus, you might wanna look at different vinegars. There's a huge variety of different v vinegars out there besides just your regular white distilled vinegar. You can go for an apple cider vinegar, uh, you know, a champagne vinegar, a rice vinegar, um, balsamic vinegars. There's all kinds of different, um, vinegars out there to be able to taste from, and they work wonderfully in different cooking techniques. Now, if you're looking to be able to get some of the kind of floral notes off of, um, you know, the citrus, you might even wanna try some different herbs or different spices, like maybe even sumac would probably be a nice one that has kind of a different kind of edge on it, um, that would work for that. But I think really what you're probably looking for is the acidity in those. So I think that the, uh, vinegars are probably your best bet. There are some places that specialize just in vinegars and in fact, I've seen tasting rooms of vinegars before where you can go through and just taste all kinds of different ones. Um, and that's just experimenting with a couple to see what it is you're looking for. If you're just doing a simple, you know, kind of a salad or something like that, um, you can try one one day and try a different one the next day.
