Salad Dressings

Summertime means bountiful gardens — but sometimes we have trouble keeping up with the bounty. Zucchini is the classic culprit. We’re here to help.  We slice it raw into pearled couscous; it offers a slight crunch and cool contrast to a rich, warm tomato vinaigrette.

The combination of crisp broccoli, dried fruit, nuts, and creamy dressing is a picnic-salad staple, but the sweetened mayonnaise dressing tends to overwhelm the dynamic flavors and textures of the other components. We made a lush but light dressing by replacing the mayonnaise with avocado and olive oil, buzzing them in a food processor with garlic and lemon so that the flavor was clean, bright, and savory. We also added shallot and tarragon to the salad to balance out the sweet tang and rich toasty flavors of the dried fruit and nuts, respectively.

 Adding smoky char to a Caesar salad sounded like a good idea, as long as we could avoid limp lettuce. Using just the firm, compact romaine hearts is a step in the right direction, and grilling them over a hot fire lets them pick up char faster before wilting. We make a simple dressing with mayonnaise instead of raw eggs and brush some of it on the cut side of the lettuce before cooking to aid browning. Baguette slices brushed with oil crisp up in a few minutes, and we finish the whole thing with more dressing and plenty of Parmesan cheese.

Kathy Gunst says in 2014, vegetables will be the new meat. Gunst’s celery slaw is a recipe that has veggies front and center. (Kathy Gunst/Here & Now)

Kathy’s Note: Make the dish at least an hour before serving.

This is a simple recipe: a few tablespoons of pre-made yogurt gives the necessary base while the milk makes up the bulk of the yogurt. I have listed whole milk as the starting point but you may use nonfat, low-fat, (unsweetened) soy milk, etc., and the formula remains the same.

Our perfect grilled vegetable recipe would have to produce charred-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside veggies with great smoky flavor and a lively dressing. Matching the vegetables in pairs doubled up our recipe’s flavor, while cooking them over moderate heat for 20 minutes gave us a great result, both inside and out. To finish our grilled vegetables recipe, we drizzled them with a quick vinaigrette while they were still warm, which boosted their flavor without overpowering them.  

In an interview with "The Sriracha Cookbook" author Randy Clemens, he told me that when they did the photos for his book, he was surprised that everyone devoured a big bowl of tropical fruit salad with sriracha-sesame vinaigrette.

Clemens, 26, a California-based culinary school grad, came up with endless dishes on which to add some sauce, including grits, cornbread, butter, sour cream, and salt.

He said that the sauce is popular all over Thailand and Vietnam. One Thai brand he particularly likes is called Shark, which has a sweetness plus a kick.

While nothing could be easier to toss in a salad, mild-mannered baby spinach always seems to fall flat. What could we do to ruffle this pile of leaves? Few greens can beat the convenience of prewashed baby spinach, but these tender leaves—and their flavor—go limp in salads. We wanted a salad that made the most of sweet, tender baby spinach.

A Santa Barbara couple started their own dude ranch in the 1950s, where visitors could take home a sample of the proprietary sauce. The combination of herbs and spices with mayonnaise and buttermilk became so popular that the consumer products giant Clorox purchased the rights to what is now known as Hidden Valley Ranch.

The origins of Thousand Island dressing are disputed. Some tales stem from the Waldorf Astoria in New York; others from Chicago’s Blackstone hotel. The most common version of the story credits Sophia LaLonde, a fisherman’s wife native to the Thousand Island region between New York and Canada. In the first decades of the 20th century, LaLonde reportedly served a mixture of ketchup, mayonnaise, and chopped pickles over a salad for shore lunch. The names Russian dressing and Thousand Island are often used interchangeably.