On the Menu
Best salad dressing recipes
Great salads are built upon the best salad dressing recipes, and once you understand the basics of how to make a salad dressing, you'll have no trouble "cooking" up salad dressings of your own invention, or creating variations on common dressings that taste great and that you can rightfully call your own.
I remember a friend explaining to me how he'd had an epiphany about good Pad Thai - the famous Thai noodle dish. The key, he said, is to think of Pad Thai as a perfect balance of sweet, sour, and salt. I think the salad dressing recipes are a perfect blend of sweet, sour, salt and fat, which isn't far off!
Here are some of the ingredients I think of as key to a good salad dressing. Not all the best salad dressing recipes have all of these ingredients, but if a salad dressing has none of them, it's an outlier - either great but not typical, or not so great! I've divided the ingredients into categories, and you would typically need one item from each or at least most of the categories.
Sweet
I generally add a very small amount of natural sweetener to a salad dressing to counteract the sourness of the acid. It's typically a teaspon or two for a full salad. Favorite sweeteners are just plain old white sugar (it's easy and everyone has it), raw sugar (perhaps healthier), honey, or maple syrup. Honey is the most challenging of the four because it takes longer to dissolve.
Sour
The two most common acids in the best salad dressing recipes are vinegar and lemon juice. On the vinegar front my favorite is balsamic vinegar, but I also use red wine vinegar (balsamic on its own can be overpowering), and apple cider vinegar for an even more subtle flavor. Flavored vinegars such as raspberry or cherry vinegar are also pleasant, and you don't have to spend a fortune buying them custom made - just take some white vinegar or apple cider vinegar, pour into a small glass container, and add a few fresh or frozen raspberries or cherries and let them stew on the counter for a couple of weeks.
You can use fresh squeezed lemon juice or lemon juice from a bottle - guess which tastes better? If you're going to the trouble of making your own dressing, you should definitely go for the fresh squeezed. Spice up your best salad dressing recipes even more with variations such as lime juice (adds a definite tropical taste) or even key lime or mayer lemon. For key limes, you'll need a lot of patience as they are tiny and it takes many of them to get enough juice for a decent-sized dressing.
Yogurt contains lactic acid (this acid, a byproduct of the lacto-acid fermentation done by the acidophilus bacteria, is what makes yogurt curdle). So if you substitute yogurt for sour cream in creamy salad recipes, you can cut back a little on the acid.
Salt
You can just toss a little salt in your dressing, but I generally prefer soy sauce or tamari except for the most delicate, light-colored dressings, because it has a stronger flavor and it helps the dressing emulsify.
For raw food faddists, Himalayan Crystal salt is supposed to be very healthy - full of essential minerals - and we use this when we don't use soy sauce. I'm generally pretty skimpy on either salt or soy but there's always a touch of it.
Fat
Few salad dressings are without some kind of oil or fat. Even dairy-based salad dressings have a little fat in the sour cream or yogurt. In my view the best salad dressing recipes are based partly on extra virgin olive oil; it's almost always the main ingredient by volume in dressings I create. But there are other oils that add a special flavor when used in small quantities, for example hazelnut oil (1-2 Tbsp in a typical dressing), walnut oil (similar quantities), hempseed oil and flaxseed oil (these contain omega fatty acids which are very good for you), or toasted sesame oil (great in salad dressings with an Asian influence). I always try to buy oils that are cold pressed, and I avoid the common grocery store brands for everything except extra virgin olive oil, because the oils are extracted by a chemical rather than a physical process, and most of the essential fatty acids are destroyed in the process. A good quality oil doesn't keep for that long in light or heat; if you have a bottle of vegetable oil that you feel fine leaving out for weeks at a time, it's not one I would care to use!
Extras
Some key ingredients in many of the best salad dressing recipes can be classed as follows:
Onion family: Garlic in very small quantities, and minced in very small pieces; green onions (which Americans sometimes call scallions); and my favorite, shallots, which look like a small, slightly pink onion and have a much more subtle flavor.
Mustard: A little mustard goes a long way. I just grab whichever bottle I spot when I open the fridge (by the way, you don't have to store mustard in the fridge, but I do out of habit). I do try to stay away from the fluorescent yellow mustard the kids put on their hot dogs though!
Fresh ground black pepper: Few of the best salad dressing recipes are complete without this!
Curry powder: A little curry powder can do wonders for vegetable salads or egg salads.
More great salad dressings
Just about every salad recipe on my site consists of the salad and the dressing, but in some cases the salad itself is pretty obvious: lettuce, a red or yellow pepper or a sliced avocado or some cherry tomatoes, and a dressing poured on top. So I'll add more of the best salad dressing recipes here that go well with any standard green salad:
Using yogurt as salad dressing, means you have added the health benefits of probiotics in yogurt into your menu.
Return from Best salad dressing recipes to the Creative Salad Recipes site home page.
