by Ted Onulak

Created on: September 16, 2008   Last Updated: March 03, 2010

 Making your own salad dressing can add a tremendous amount of flavor to any everyday salad.  It can be far healthier, by customizing your dressings to the special dietary needs of family members, such as carb-free, sugar-free or low sodium. 

One of the best tools for making salad dressing in a snap is a mini-blender, such as the Magic Bullet.  It’s a breeze to clean and does the mixing in seconds. 

Once you start making homemade salad dressing, your family will taste the difference from bottle dressings right away. If you go back to bottled salad dressing, don’t be shocked if you put a bottled dressing on the table and you get a look like you forgot to pay the electric bill!  

The real keys to salad dressings are fresh ingredients, the ratio of oil to vinegar and the sequence of adding ingredients.

Another great tip is to use infused vinegars.  Rather than pay big gourmet prices for tiny bottles of infused vinegars, by a big bottle of white vinegar, (Chinese white rice wine vinegar is also very nice and delicate) and divide the vinegars into containers with your favorite fresh herbs.  I particularly like tarragon (tarragon vinegar is a key ingredient in one of the most popular commercial mayos), and lemon verbena.  Infused vinegar will give you all the flavors without little leafy bits floating in your dressing. It will only take about 24 hours to notice the infusion of flavor in the vinegar. 

Honey Mustard Dressing

Ingredients: One cup of olive oil, one-quarter cup of tarragon infused white vinegar, two finely chopped shallots, one teaspoon of good Dijon mustard, and one tablespoon of honey.  Fresh ground salt and black pepper to taste will finish your dressing.  

In a small bowl, combine shallots, vinegar, honey and Dijon mustard and whisk with a fork.  At this point, taste for a nice balance of sweet and sour.  Add a touch more of vinegar or honey to suit your taste.  Mix well.

Slowly, drizzle the oil into the bowl while whisking.  The slower you add the oil, the easier it will be to emulsify.

Of course if you have a mini-blender, you can add all the ingredients at once and just blend at high-speed for about 20 seconds to emulsify. 

Dress your salad right before serving or present the dressing at the table in a gravy boat with serving ladle.

This dressing goes best with more hearty greens, such as spinach, mescalin or radicchio.  It is also bold enough to go with bacon crumbles, deli meats and shrimp.   This delightful fresh salad dressing is sure to be a crowd pleaser.  

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