Three years ago, I met a former personal chef who affirmed my desire to make my own salad dressings. She described with mesmerizing confidence how she whisked tahini and lemon juice as the base for a unique dressing. She rattled off a whole slew of other enticing and inventive combinations, but that’s the one that stuck with me.
It took another year or two, but I did finally take her advice and venture into the world of homemade immersions, the splendor of oil and vinegar, citrus and fat, egg emulsified in avocado oil drizzled on veg and warm chicken. It is a splendid land of opportunity, this realm of homemade salad dressings. And given all the panic about seed oils, you’ll have the satisfaction of avoiding those if you choose.
Two sources became foundational in my amateur quest for elevated daily living. For a foolproof Greek dressing, the immensely popular Alexandra Cooks blog offers this five-ingredient recipe. The flavor profile of a Greek salad is unparalleled. While making your own dressing removes those mysterious, artificial ingredients that modify our food, the subtler flavor of this basic Greek dressing lets the other ingredients shine.
Now, for creamy dressings: I couldn’t wrap my head around these. When someone showed up at a potluck with fantastic, homemade blue cheese dressing, I didn’t know how you would even begin making that. Then, a friend dropped off the most delicious Caesar salad dressing I have ever had and shared the recipe. I was baffled to find in the Defined Dish a homemade mayonnaise base and anchovies in the dressing recipe.
However, Alex Snodgrass, the woman behind the Defined Dish blog and series of cookbooks, offers a simple and comprehensible approach to homemade mayo that involves none of the angst such projects can devolve into by recommending an immersion blender. Her admonition to let the egg come to room temperature is apt. It works like a charm!
As for the anchovies? Those have become a fun addition to the family dining experience, helpfully disguised in various dressings and sauces, adding flavor, and supposedly a boatload of nutrients, without their fishy presence being front of mind.
A commonality in these baseline dressings that have transformed our dinners is the combination of Dijon mustard and red wine vinegar. Add this to tuna, chicken salad, dressings of various kinds, and the results are satisfying.
Like sourdough, there is a miraculous quality to combining the ingredients into a dressing that looks nothing like the component parts. Here, the elements are more complex—oil and various vinegars and tiny fish and such—but there are miracles nonetheless. Making dressing doesn’t have to be a laborious add-on but an enjoyable activity for the homemaker already engaged in preparing food regularly. The feeling of competence will put a wind in your sails.
