I’m not sure how long ago it was that I started making my own salad dressings. It might have been after a friend’s wedding, where they served a salad at the reception with an amazing champagne vinaigrette on it, and I wanted to replicate it. It might have been after reading the ingredients on a dozen bottles of dressing from the store and seeing some form of corn syrup in all of them. Either way, it’s easy, fast and delicious to make a single serving of fresh salad dressing to put on your salad, and it’s a lot of fun to experiment.
All of these are some form of vinaigrette – meaning the base is some kind of oil and some kind of vinegar. I like making wasabi and sriracha vinaigrettes when my salad has shrimp and citrus on it; I like making mustard and blue cheese vinaigrettes when I’m topping a salad with grilled chicken and walnuts. Not long ago Niles made me a whole tupperware full of roasted garlic clove vinaigrette that was just amazing. You can experiment with different vinegars, different oils, different flavor balances, and different ingredients. I tend to favor honey over the vinegar in most of mine, because I like a touch of sweet, but you can just as easily add a little more vinegar to make it a little more tart. You can do anything you want, and you’re no longer limited to the three bottles of salad dressing that have been sitting in your fridge door for who knows how long.
I love making my own dressing. My husband and I eat salads for lunch every day of the week so I try to get in the habit of making a large batch on Sunday so he doesn’t resort to the terrible processed stuff on the shelves. That said, being vegan, I’d swap out the honey for the agave syrup!
My favorite salad dressing is what I call my “vaguely asian lemon vinaigrette”: lemon juice, honey, sesame oil, a little mirin, and olive oil. It’s got a lovely toastiness from the sesame oil, and it isn’t cloyingly sweet like other “asian” dressings can be!
These look delightful! I keep salad things at work (lettuce, fruit, whatever extras come in my CSA bag that week) to make salads for lunch. I always used to default to just oil and vinegar, which I keep in my office, and lately I’ve nixed those and have been using only salt and pepper. It makes for a very….clean, fresh-tasting salad (and when I have good ingredients, it lets them shine), but one of these days I’m sure I’m going to get sick of it. And that’s when I’ll make these!
Also if you don’t want to use vinegar, you can just substitute with squeezing a lemon on the salad! :)