8 Healthy Salad Dressing Recipes You Should Make at Home
Whenever I tell someone I love healthy food, the first thing they inevitably ask me is if I eat salad all day. Here’s the truth for you: I actually don’t really like salad that much. I am definitely not one of those people who grab a mixing bowl from the cabinet, dump in a bunch of greens, and happily go to town. I am not a rabbit, and I don’t enjoy eating like one.
For a salad to be good for me, it has to be something substantial. It has to have a great mix of flavors, textures, and a really good dressing. I love veggies, but let’s call a spade a spade—veggies can be boring-tastic if you don’t do something to spice them up a little bit. And a good salad dressing goes a looooooong way to making veggies exciting (even for those folks who aren’t big veggie fans—like my two year old, who happily chows down on raw veggies when they are dipped in the Greek Yogurt Ranch Dressing you’ll see below).
Salad dressings are super easy to make at home, and I think learning how to make your favorite dressing in your own kitchen is a super useful skill to have. It’ll save you tons of cash. The markup on bottled salad dressings is CRAZY—most of them you can make for pennies on the dollar.
You can completely control the ingredients. Have you ever cruised the salad dressing aisle and checked ingredient lists? There are definitely some cleaner options out there, but many of them are packed with artificial colors, flavors, and more sugar and salt than is really necessary.
And my favorite part, you can completely customize the taste to your liking. Once you “land” on your house dressing that is perfect for your family’s tastebuds, you always will have that recipe in your pocket. It’s like having the healthy eating gold ticket!
Below, I’m sharing eight of my favorite simple, easy, and healthy salad dressing recipes that you can make at home. Honestly, you probably have most of the ingredients to make most of the dressings already in your pantry and fridge—there are no fancy pants ingredients that you’ll have to track down at a speciality store.
All eight recipes can be made using the jar-and-shake method. Just grab a jar with a tight-fitting lid (I use a wide-mouth pint canning jar and a plastic cap), toss in all the ingredients, and shake the dickens out of it until it’s well-blended. There are a couple recipes below that could be made smoother if you use a food processor or a blender—but you don’t have to if you’re fine with a chunkier dressing.
All the recipes below make about one cup of dressing—enough to last for a few days of salads, but not so much that it goes bad before you get a chance to use it up. Use up the dressings with dairy in them within a week. The vinaigrettes can last two or more weeks in the fridge in an airtight container.
Each recipe below has amounts for using fresh OR dried herbs—you can use all fresh, all dried, or any combination of the two. Just keep in mind that the dried herbs will take a while longer to impart their flavor on the dressing. A good rule of thumb is that if you’re using mostly fresh ingredients, you can get by with using your dressings within 15-30 minutes. If you’re using mostly dried ingredients, you’d be better off waiting 2+ hours so the flavors can really develop. Let’s get started.
I think everyone needs a really good ranch dressing recipe in their back pocket—and this is mine. By using a base of whole milk Greek yogurt, the dressing is packed with healthy fat and protein. If you’d like to make the dressing lighter, you can use lowfat Greek yogurt (I’d skip nonfat—in my opinion, “nonfat” just means “nonflavor”).
This recipe uses a little bit of buttermilk (it really helps give the dressing that typical ranch flavor), but if you’re sick of buying big containers of buttermilk, and not using it all, do what I do—I freeze it! I freeze buttermilk in one ounce cubes, and then I have it on hand whenever I need it for dressings, pancakes, or biscuits.
Good for: all kinds of salads, dipping veggies, dipping pizza (so good), honestly, dipping anything
8 Healthy Salad Dressing Recipes You Should Make at Home – http://go.shr.lc/2ixEvXN via @wholefully