How to make an excellent salad dressing

Big bowls of lettuce were not a regular fixture for me growing up. Vinaigrette, if we needed it, came bottled by Paul Newman. Even now I practise the bare minimum: olive oil, vinegar, salt. I should up my game. But where to start? 

Sort your basic formula

Salad Freak (Abrams) by Martha Stewart’s food stylist, editor and producer Jess Damuck stipulates one part acid (citrus or vinegar) to three parts oil, plus “whatever extra ingredients sound good to you”. Her suggestions range from blue cheese and buttermilk to tahini, miso and mustard. There must be more to balancing flavour, but I welcome her invitation to “get creative”. Obvious next steps include expanding my vinegar collection to embrace fancier options like muscatel or Pedro Ximenez sherry vinegar and flavouring my oils. Food writer Kitty Coles suggests warming fennel seeds, lemon rind and a few chilli flakes in olive oil before straining for a good all-rounder.  

Capitalise on stuff already in your pantry

The “Source family dressing” from Damuck’s book Health Nut (Abrams) uses onion powder and garlic powder to bolster a mixed-salad dressing of lemon juice, wholegrain mustard, white-wine vinegar and olive oil. She fancifies a lemon and olive-oil vinaigrette for shaved fennel and tuna salad by adding a pinch of saffron to the lemon juice and then sweetening with two mashed dates. I also appreciate her “hippie trick” of using nutritional yeast in place of, say, cheese.

Get creative with souring agents

Turkish-Cypriot chef Selin Kiazim formerly of Oklava in Shoreditch is my go-to here. A traditional fattoush salad is bound by olive oil, lemon juice or vinegar and, crucially, tangy sumac. She adds creaminess with yoghurt, which she also whisks into olive oil and vinegar to punch up iceberg lettuce. Pomegranate molasses are another Turkish staple for introducing tanginess as well as subtle sweetness. Tamarind and amchoor (dried mango powder), of which I have plenty from Asian cooking, could be worked into dressings too.

Add blitzed fruit or vegetables

For crunchy salads, Kiazim recommends pulsed black olives in balsamic vinegar and olive oil with a little dried oregano. Whizzed-up passionfruit is added to white wine vinegar and olive oil with minced shallots, chilli flakes, honey and thyme to dress the beetroot and frisée salad in Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson’s Kismet cookbook (Penguin Random House). At Lula Cafe in Chicago, they swear by celery softened in oil then blended into Caesar dressing. Since I’ve always run out of Worcestershire sauce whenever I want to make Caesar dressing, I welcome a tip from Luke Farrell of London’s Speedboat Bar to swap in fish sauce instead. As for tomato or potato salad, Kiazim suggests plating up with a drizzle of sherry caramel (made from caster sugar, sherry vinegar and sherry) or lemongrass caramel (lemongrass, lime, palm sugar) on south-east Asian-inspired salads. Anything that treats salad like a sundae gets my thumbs-up. 

@ajesh34