Salads and Dressings

Take a look at the door shelves of your refrigerator and tell yourself, “The gaggle has to go!” That is, the dozen or so bottles of commercial salad dressing you have on the shelves in your refrigerator door. Some of them have been there since the Bush administration, right? George H. W. Bush, that is. They’re chock-full of preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilizers, and sugar, and they’re made with oils that are considered to be pretty unheathful: soybean and cottonseed being two of the most common. It’s much better to make your own, and I’m going to give you a couple of master recipes and then some variations, along with a couple of specialty ones.

You’ll often see recipes for salads that will give you a specific dressing to make, and this tendency will imply to you that making dressing is a finicky thing, resulting in many little bits of leftovers cluttering up your fridge. So there are tons of versions out there, for example, of the classic strawberry/spinach salad with a coordinating dressing. I just took a look at some of them. Talk about uninspiring! Thin, unemulsified dressings or gloppy overly-sweet ones. You’ll tend to just buy a bottle of Ken’s Lite Raspberry-Walnut Vinaigrette and be done with it. Or you could make my version, listed as a variation on my Creamy Italian Dressing, and have something that’s actually worth eating and that you’d be happy to have on hand for other fruit-based salads. Also, many dressing recipes are just . . . how do I say this? . . . wrong. I see recipes for ranch dressing all the time, for instance, that contain little or no mayonnaise and are based almost totally on buttermilk or yogurt, thus making them “healthy.” But such versions of the classic are also chalky, flavorless and thin. So what’s the point?

Let’s do some cost/benefit analysis before going on any further. Below I list the cost for my master oil-and-vinegar dressing as compared to some name brands. These guidelines will give you a good general idea about how homemade compares to the stuff you buy in cost but also, and more importantly, in quality. Yes, you pay more per ounce for your own stuff, but what’s in those ounces? That’s the real question.

Cost of making your own creamy Italian salad dressing vs. store-bought:

The El Cheapo brand of Italian salad dressing, Wishbone, is $ .12/oz on Amazon, so $1.87 for a 15-oz. bottle. At my local grocery chain, King Soopers, Kraft Italian Dressing is about $ .16/oz, and the store-brand Kroger’s is about $ .10.

The luscious creamy Italian salad dressing I make has these ingredients and costs:

2 T. lemon juice – $ .12 – 1 oz.
1-2 cloves garlic – $ .59/head, so maybe $ .10
1 egg – $ .25 – 2 oz.
1/8 scant. tsp. gelatin – $ .02
1 T. sugar – less than $ .01 – ½ oz.
1/3 cup red wine vinegar – $ .55 – 3 oz.
1 tsp. Italian seasoning – $ .25
freshly-ground pepper – $ .02
¾ cup olive oil – 6 oz., so $1.50 – 6 oz.

TOTALS: Yield approx 13 oz., costing $2.82, so about $ .22/oz.

What I paid for my ingredients may not match your costs, but the total should be somewhere in the ballpark. Obviously the store-brand and mass-market salad dressings are cheaper, but they’re made with other oils, usually soybean oil, which are much less expensive (and worse for you) than olive oil, and you can see that the biggest item in terms of volume and therefore cost for my recipe is the oil. There are brands that say they’re made “with” olive oil, but that doesn’t mean that they’re made entirely with olive oil. High-fructose corn syrup is usually the sugar source. The first item on the ingredient list for the Wishbone dressing is water! That’s a very common thing to see on an item that’s sold as “light,” but not for a regular one; I was surprised to see this on the WB regular dressing ingredients. As I always say, you don’t want to pay for water. And a 2-tablespoon serving has 4 grams of sugar, while the one above would have about one. Obviously neither one is giving you a huge sugar boost, but it’s always better to have less sugar. If I were to go with a higher-end dressing such as Ken’s I could pay about $ .17/oz. all the way up to $.42/oz. for a specialty French vinaigrette. Interestingly, that last one has no olive oil at all. Ken’s at least has some. And there are all sorts of weird ingredients, including xantham gum (for thickening) and various chemicals as preservatives, in most if not all commercial dressings.

What I suggest, then, is making your own dressings, choosing what looks good to you from a couple of master recipes with variations, one for oil/vinegar-based and one for mayonnaise-based ones. These can give you enough variety to cover any green/veggie salads you’d want to make. (Potato or pasta salads are a little different.) I want you to be able to look at a salad recipe or the contents of your veggie drawer or pantry and say, “Right—I have a dressing on hand for that/I can make one with what I have.” You won’t ever say, “That salad looks good, but I don’t have the ingredients for the dressing” or “That dressing looks too complicated for me to bother with.” or even “I’ll just use the stuff from the grocery store.” No, no, no! You’ll be confident that you have the basic proportions in mind and that you know what you’re doing. There will be no need, once you have a repertoire of recipes that you like, for you to keep making new ones. Stick with what you have. And remember: the salad police won’t nail you for a mismatch. If you have the ingredients for a Greek salad: tomatoes, peppers, red onions, cucumbers, Kalamata olives, and feta cheese, but you have a container of Italian salad dressing on hand, you can safely use the two together. Greek salad dressing would use a mixture of lemon juice and vinegar, and the herbs would be a little different, but so what? Your combo will also be delicious. If you’re starting with a new batch of dressing and you know you want to make this particular type of salad, then go ahead and make the “appropriate” one, but otherwise just go with what you have!

Let’s start with vinaigrettes, dressings based on some type of emulsion formed by oil and vinegar.

I’m extremely picky about how I think oil-and-vinegar salad dressings should be made. My big issue is that I don’t like the ones that have to be shaken up before they’re used; they’re inconvenient, especially if you want to have the container sitting on the table for people to help themselves. One of the most vivid memories I have of this problem comes from a banquet I attended at a fancy Italian restaurant. We were served salad without dressing, which was perfectly fine, and had small pitchers of dressing on the table to add as desired. But–and I find it hard to understand what the rationale was here–it was just oil and vinegar, completely unmixed. There was no spoon or whisk in the pitcher; we were clearly supposed to just use the spout to pour the dressing onto our individual salads. But since there was no ability to mix or shake it up, the people who poured the first few servings got only oil, while later ones got only the vinegar. I remember us looking at each other in puzzlement. I think someone tried using his/her fork to whisk it up and that worked to a certain extent, but honestly! If I could remember the name of the restaurant I’d make sure never to go there again.

Another beef I have with the separating dressings is that they tend to be thin and so therefore don’t coat the salad ingredients very well but instead tend to slide off, ending up in a puddle at the bottom. While most commercial dressings have thickeners and stabilizers that will keep the dressing emulsified, even some of them separate. (Think Wish-Bone Italian.) All of my dressings, though, will stay mixed because of a combination of emulsifiers and thickeners that I use: egg, mustard, and/or gelatin. I give a very easy method for heating up the egg before you mix it in, thus relieving everyone’s mind (mostly mine) about possible salmonella. (I’ve read that only about one in every 10,000 eggs is contaminated, but I don’t want that solitary egg ending up raw in my dressing!) My dressings also have less sugar and more high-quality ingredients than the commercial ones. A serving of the aforementioned Wish Bone Italian dressing (2 tablespoons) has 3 grams of sugar, or about 3/4 of a teaspoon; mine has 1.2 grams, or a little over 1/4 of a teaspoon. Not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things. But it also has soybean oil in it while mine has olive, a much better oil, and its first two ingredients are “distilled vinegar” and . . . water. Distilled vinegar is the cheap stuff you use to unstop your drain, and water is water. (That’s the kind of deep nutritional analysis you get on this website.) So an ounce-per-ounce price comparison wouldn’t make much sense because you’re paying for water with the Wish Bone version. (I always refuse to buy anything labeled “lite,” especially if it’s a dressing, precisely because of the paying-for-water problem.)

So here’s the full recipe for what I call my “house dressing.” Over the years I’ve attempted to get out of the egg business and figure out some other way to keep the dressing emulsified but have never succeeded. And really–once you’ve prepared the egg a couple of times you’ll find it to be very easy and straightforward, giving you great results with a small investment of time and trouble. (You may wonder about pasteurized eggs, and you can certainly use them if you’d like to avoid the whole egg-cooking business. But they’re not readily available, and you won’t be able to use them up in dressing before their expiration date unless you’re making gallons of the stuff, so you’ll end up having to use them in something just calling for regular eggs. They ‘re kind of expensive, so you really don’t want to do that) Notice the tiny amount of gelatin called for; don’t add any more than that. This dressing tends to be a bit thin without it; just buy a box of cheap store-brand unflavored gelatin packets and keep it on hand. As the dressing chills it will get a little thicker from the gelatin and be just poi-fect!

Below are a number of variations based on the above master recipe, along with suggested uses. I have a number of recipes in my file and have standardized them to fit the 2 tablespoons lemon juice/1 egg/1/3 cup additional acid, usually vinegar/3/4 cup oil ratios in my recipe above. You’ll notice that this formula is heavier on the acid than the classic ratio of one part vinegar or other acid to three parts oil. Those proportions sound very bland to me. (Some recipes are more along the lines of one part acid to four parts oil, which I think would just taste like oil.) Instead, if you count in the lemon juice used with the egg, you have a ratio of over one part vinegar to two parts oil. The egg has a mellowing effect, I guess, as I’ve never felt that this dressing was too puckery. You’ll notice that if I add mustard I take out the gelatin.

VARIATIONS

Sherry Vinegar Dressing: The simplest variation, just substituting sherry vinegar for the red wine version. I’d leave everything else the same. Sherry vinegar is very mellow and mild; it’s also usually not available at the grocery store and so has to be ordered online.

Balsamic Dressing: Use balsamic vinegar and add a heaping teaspoon of Dijon mustard; omit gelatin. This makes for a stronger, richer dressing, and the balsamic is sweeter than the red wine. I like the swap as is, but you might try adding just half the amount of sugar and then tasting it to see if you think it’s sweet enough with that amount. You want strongly-flavored, crisp greens and veggies with this, I’d think, so spring mix wouldn’t work all that well. Sturdy lettuce such as Romaine would be good.

Cider/Maple Dressing: Use cider vinegar and add a heaping teaspoon of Dijon or honey mustard; omit gelatin and Italian herbs. Use maple syrup instead of sugar; original recipe calls for two tablespoons, but, as above, you might try just one tablespoon first and taste the dressing before adding more. If you wanted an all-apple dressing, you could use some of your homemade cider syrup that you have squirreled away in your fridge instead of the maple syrup. The original recipe called for this to be used on a salad of pears, walnuts, blue cheese, red onions and greens of some sort. It’s a great combination. You could, of course, use apple slices in the place of the pears, especially if you used the cider syrup in the dressing.

Citrus Dressing: Use a combo of lemon juice and rice vinegar for the red wine vinegar; two tablespoons of the vinegar and three tablespoons plus one teaspoon of the lemon juice will give you the 1/3 cup amount (or you can just put the two tablespoons of vinegar in your measuring cup and add lemon juice to the 1/3 cup line). Use vegetable oil instead of olive oil and honey instead of sugar. Add one heaping teaspoon honey mustard and omit the gelatin, Italian herbs and garlic. Add one tablespoon fresh or one teaspoon dried tarragon and one tablespoon fresh chives. This is a nice not-too-pungent dressing that would be good on any salad, but I’ve used it particularly in a main-dish combo of greens, lightly-cooked green beans, red onions, and some type of protein: salmon, chicken or (the best, I think) tuna. Fresh tuna, that is.

Lemon Dressing: Replace most or all of the red wine vinegar with lemon juice, cut the sugar to a teaspoon, and add a heaping teaspoon of lemon pepper instead of the salt and pepper. Use mustard. Add a few drops of lemon oil if you have it. I’ve used this variation with great success as the dressing on some Mediterranean-ish salads–my version of tabbouleh and a chicken salad using this instead of a mayo-based dressing. It’s a sharper, more lemony version of the above citrus dressing.

Greek Salad Dressing: Use a half and half mixture of lemon juice and red-wine vinegar, cut the sugar to a teaspoon, and use the teaspoon of mustard.  Omit the Italian herbs and use Greek ones: marjoram and oregano are good, fresh or dried.

Raspberry-Walnut Dressing: Replace the red-wine vinegar with raspberry vinegar and the olive oil with walnut oil or some other nut oil. (Nut oils tend to be expensive and should be kept in the fridge so they dnn’t go rancid.) Omit the garlic, gelatin and Italian herbs. Add one teaspoon honey mustard. Can’t you just imagine this dressing on a strawberry-spinach-almond salad? So great. I think this is much better than that gloppy poppy-seed dressing usually called for. (But you could add some poppy seeds if you have them on hand. I’ve never seen much point to them beyond appearance, and they can be very expensive, but hey! Maybe that’s just me.)

Cilantro-Lime Vinaigrette: Use lime juice instead of lemon juice for cooking the egg, then a combo of equal parts lime juice and white wine vinegar to replace the red wine vinegar. Replace the Italian seasoning with half a bunch or so of fresh cilantro, well washed and with lower stems trimmed off. (There’s no need to strip the leaves off the upper stems, as cilantro stems have a lot of flavor.) You can also put in one small whole jalapeno or half of a larger one; remove the seeds and ribs. Use brown sugar instead of white and start out with half a tablespoon, then taste. I felt that a whole tablespoon was too much. Add 1 teaspoon of mustard and omit the gelatin. Any kind of mustard will do; the original recipe calls for “spicy brown mustard.” Add a squirt or two of hot sauce, especially if you didn’t use the jalapeno–sriracha is a nice, not-too-hot choice, but whatever you have in the fridge and like is fine. This is good on any type of green salad that you’re serving with a Mexican-inspired meal and would go especially well with the addition of corn kernels, sliced black olives and/or avocado; it would also be good on a cabbage salad/coleslaw. I don’t like regular cabbage but instead use Napa or Savoy cabbage (which are substantially more expensive than the regular stuff but well worth the extra money in my opinion); whatever combo you like of cabbage (including red cabbage), shredded carrots, etc., would work here.

Shortcut Mexican-Style Vinaigrette: The fresh herb-y flavor of the recipe above is great, but if you’re pressed for time or making enough dressing for a big crowd, you can certainly use taco seasoning in place of the cilantro and hot sauce. You can just use all lemon juice for simplicity’s sake if you’d like. Leave out the mustard and salt, put in the gelatin, and reduce olive oil to ½ cup. Start out with a heaping tablespoon of the seasoning, then taste. (I buy the big size at Costco of McCormick Premium Taco Seasoning Mix; any of these mixes have some sugar in it so cut the amount of added sugar in half, then taste.) This dressing would work well with the salad ingredients listed for the cilantro dressing above.

Asian Vinaigrette:  Omit salt. Replace the red wine vinegar with rice vinegar and the white sugar with brown. Omit the Italian seasoning; Add two tablespoons of soy sauce, one tablespoon of grated fresh ginger, and one teaspoon of Asian chili garlic sauce. In place of the 3/4 cup olive oil use 1/2 cup vegetable oil and 1/4 cup toasted sesame oil. If you have them on hand, add a tablespoon or so of sesame seeds after the final mixing.

Caesar-Style Dressing: This variation is actually closer to authentic Caesar dressing than the ones made with mayonnaise, since the original version has an egg in it. Omit the sugar, Italian herbs, and gelatin. increase the mustard to a tablespoon/heaping tablespoon, and add ½ tsp. anchovies or 1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce. Probably doesn’t need salt.

And finally, my favorite variation (and you may think that I’ve changed it so much that it’s a whole new recipe, but there it is):

Peanut/Lime Vinaigrette: Omit salt, pepper, Italian seasoning and egg but leave in the garlic and add one tablespoon grated fresh ginger. Reduce oil to 1/2 cup and use vegetable oil, add 1/2 heaping cup of peanut butter. Replace vinegar with lime juice and add two tablespoons honey and two tablespoons of soy sauce. Add 1/2 teaspoon chili-garlic paste, or 1 teaspoon hot sauce (or to taste) or 1/4 tsp. ground red pepper. With these proportions the dressing will be quite thick, so you may want to add some extra liquid. I’d advise an extra tablespoon of lime juice. You can add a little water if you still think the mixture is too thick to pour. Also, this dressing is very thick when cold but thins down as it comes to room temp, so try to remember to take it out of the fridge ahead of the meal so it can warm up a little. Since this dressing doesn’t use the egg it wouldn’t necessarily need to be refrigerated, but I feel better about keeping it cold.

Below are the variations laid out in a table, in case you find that format easier to follow:

SALAD DRESSING VARIATIONS

Now let’s go on to homemade mayonnaise-based dressings, specifically basic ranch dressing and variations. Oh man! Are there tons of ranch dressing recipes out there or what? They are all over the place proportion-wise. (Real) ranch dressing is a combo of mayonnaise and dairy with some spices and herbs, but how you put these together is very much a matter of taste. So I’m going to give you my taste. Trying to make ranch dressing “healthy” by leaving out or drastically cutting down on the mayo and using low-fat or fat-free ingredients is going to produce a very disappointing result. I just can’t understand why some of the versions out there have been allowed to stay. Makes you wonder if people are actually making and eating these dressings.

If you go with the classic Hidden Valley Ranch proportions, you’ll have a half mayo/half dairy combo. I like to use a thick dairy ingredient (sour cream or full-fat yogurt), both of which I almost always have on hand, and they last just about forever, usually being good well past their expiration dates. (As someone said once, “Why is there an expiration date on sour cream? Isn’t it already spoiled?”) As long as it’s not moldy or pinkish it’s fine, but you probably shouldn’t make up a big batch of dressing with expired dairy unless you’re going to use it up fairly quickly.

I’m including a somewhat controversial ingredient in my version: MSG. You can certainly leave it out (or, if you follow one purist’s online recipe, include dried mushrooms!), but honestly, folks: MSG is no more unhealthy than salt. It was originally extracted from seaweed, for heaven’s sake, and occurs naturally (as glutamic acid) in all sorts of fruits and vegetables. (Kind of like nitrates—or maybe nitrites? I can never keep them straight–but don’t get me started on that one.) Just 1/4 teaspoon in my generous recipe is all you need. Get yourself that little bottle of Ac’cent and go with it. It gives a depth of flavor that you won’t get with anything else (except those blasted mushrooms).

I’ve tried to make this recipe as streamlined as I can, and I’ve also given alternatives for fresh vs. dried ingredients.

ULTIMATE HOMEMADE RANCH DRESSING

Yield: A little over two cups

Dry ingredients:

¼ tsp. garlic powder (or one clove fresh garlic, pressed)
1 tsp. dried onion flakes or ½ tsp. onion powder (or 2-3 scallions, white and light green parts)
½ tsp. salt (if not using the MSG)
Generous grindings of pepper
1/4 tsp MSG (optional; use in place of salt)
1 tsp. sugar, optional (I don’t like my ranch dressing to be at all sweet)

Herbs:

Dill, parsley and chives are the required ones. I’m not going to tell you to chop them finely because you’re going to blend everything up anyway. Aim for several generous springs of each herb, stripping the leaves from the stems unless they’re very small and leaning more heavily on the ones you like best. For dried herbs put in about 1 teaspoon each, then taste. But really—fresh is better, and these are very easy to grow. Chives and dill are also fairly readily available at the regular grocery store, and of course parsley is always around and very cheap.

Wet Ingredients:

1 cup mayonnaise (please no light stuff!)
1 cup sour cream or yogurt (full fat!—sour cream is absolutely the best, but yogurt will work okay)
2 tablespoons vinegar (I like white wine vinegar.)

Use a food processor or a blender and blend everything up. You want everything to be nicely mixed but with visible flecks of herbs if you’re using fresh ones. (So you might want to blend everything else up first and then add the herbs; your choice.) It should probably sit for an hour or so in the fridge for the flavors to meld, whatever that means, and also to thicken up a bit. After you’ve made a batch or two you may come up with some tweaks of your own, but this is a good basic recipe that I really like.

Variations:

Smoky Ranch: just add a teaspoon, or to taste, of smoked paprika, one of the world’s greatest seasonings.

Green Goddess: Double the herbs and add a teaspoon of anchovy paste, a couple teaspoons of Worcestershire sauce, or 1-2 anchovies—whatever you have on hand. If you have some tarragon, fresh or dried, put in some of that, too. You can sub lemon juice for the vinegar; either way is fine.

Jalapeno-Cilantro: Use a jalapeno in place of the onion (removing the seeds and ribs) and cilantro in place of the parsley and dill.