15+ Healthy Salad Dressing Recipes You Should Make at Home
For me, for a salad to be good, it has to be something substantial. It has to have a great mix of flavors, textures, and 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 cucumbers and tomatoes when they are dipped in the Greek Yogurt Ranch Dressing you'll see below).
Why should I make homemade salad dressings?
Salad dressings are super easy to make at home, and I think learning how to make your favorite salad dressings 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 OUTRAGEOUS-most of them you can make for pennies on the dollar. Combine these cheaper dressing recipes with all my mason jar salad recipes, and you've got yourself a quick path to a budget workweek lunch.
And my favorite part is that 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.
What ingredients do I need for these dressings?
Below, I'm sharing fifteen 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 specialty store.
For most salad dressings, you'll need:
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- Something acidic. Lemon juice, lime juice, balsamic vinegar, red wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar, or white wine vinegar are all good choices.
- Some fat. Oil is a standard ingredient in most vinaigrette-style dressings. With a few exceptions (looking at you, sesame oil in the ginger-sesame dressing), you want a mildly-flavored oil that won't stand out in the dressing. Extra virgin olive oil or avocado oil are my favorites.
- Something sweet. A little sweetness can bring all the flavors together and round out the dressing. Honey is my go-to, but maple syrup, agave, or even a bit of granulated sugar will work as well.
- Salt, pepper, garlic, and other herbs and spices. Salt and pepper will enhance the flavor of the other ingredients-don't skip them where they are called for!
All of these 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 mason 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 of 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.
How long do homemade salad dressings last?
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.
Do I need fresh herbs or dried herbs?
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.
If you master a handful of these easy salad dressing recipes, you'll be in good shape to never buy the bottle stuff again if you don't want to.
One of the best salad dressing blogs I have seen... These are wonderful and easy to make.. I live rural and have been making my own dressings for a long time.. Nice twist on the recipes.. I copied all of them!!! Keep the blog going its fantastic!!
Looking for a Smokey BBQ Ranch Dressing
Can you help
Thanks
Hmm, I don't know of one offhand. You could try adding some spices to the ranch dressing here, but I'm not sure on amounts!
How long will these last before they go bad?
The ones with dairy in them will be good for a week in the fridge. The others will be good for 2 weeks+ in the fridge in an airtight container.
Oh my god, thank you SO much! All the nasty additives in the supermarket's salad dressings have been by far the biggest problem in my healthy eating, as I like to binge on salad daily. I've felt truly terrible putting that junk into myself. I see much brighter future with these recipes! Thanks again 🙂
Enjoy!!
I recently developed an issue with my gallbladder, not gallstones, and would like to know if any of this is gallbladder friendly.
You know, I'm not sure. Your doctor would know a lot more!
I absolutely LOVE your Greek Yogurt Blue Cheese Dressing! It is healthy & delicious. I didn't have buttermilk so just substituted skimmed milk. I actually added a little extra milk since the dressing was pretty thick--which makes it even lower in calories. I also cut the salt down to 1/4 tsp since the blue cheese makes it salty. Thank you so much for sharing!
This post is how I found your blog...and man, am I glad or what?! I have loved the 'idea' of salads all summer for years (hello...I live in India where summers are freakishly long and hot). But every time I tried to make a salad dressing in the past, it was a DISASTER. Like - inedible. And I'd go back to using bottled Cesaer Salad Dressing and then worry I'm consuming way too many calories and sugars, and just give up on salad. Until I found this post. This changed my life. I have tried most of these dressings now and I ❤️ them! They're SO good. The Italian and Blue Cheese Dressing are my absolute favorites though. I now eat salad once (and often twice) a day and thank you everytime! These recipes are super duper awesome!
The Blue Cheese is one of my favorites too! Glad you love them!
Just made the lemon vinaigrette dressing - love it!
Hooray! Glad you liked it!
Its so good!!! Thanks for sharing!
Thanks, Joanna! We're so glad you like it!
how do you combat adding too much buttermilk without adding EVERYTHING again? what is the main ingredient to increase to reverse the taste?
A little bit of sugar (or honey or maple syrup) should do the trick. 🙂
Hello! These look great, but I can't seem to find the actual recipe or a link to them. Can anyone help with this?
We added a new recipe plugin, and it didn't immediately transfer to mobile well. It should be fixed now! Sorry about that!
I just noticed you have no nutritional information for these dressings. For example, how many calories per serving and what a serving size is. This would be very helpful for those of us on strict diets that only allow the use of 10 calorie or less dressings on our salads.
There isn’t a RECIPE for individual dressings but just says to put in a bottle/jar then leave for 30 mins minimum or ideally 2 hours
There should be recipes for each of the dressing flavors, at the bottom of the post!
How can I print these receipes?
We added a new recipe plugin, and it didn't immediately transfer to mobile well. It should be fixed now! Sorry about that!
I can't print them without the ads covering up your text. That's annoying. Tried the honey mustard and the Greek yogurt ranch. Great! Thanks for sharing these.
I enjoyed the Honey Mustard recipe very much! I used 1/4 tsp of mustard.
Where is your classic CAESAR salad dressing?
Nutritional yeast is a tasty, healthy addition to dressing, as well as finely ground nuts or seeds.. (I use a coffe-bean grinder). I use a tiny round whisk I got on Amazon when I don't use the bottle-shaker method. I like to combine BOTH citrus and a vinegar in the same dressing. You can try different types of citrus, including tangerine/orange for something not as tart as lemon/lime. I also like to use different types of oils in the same dressing. As an alternative to honey, try delicious maple syrup (real maple, not the fake stuff with corn syrup). I also find it a good idea to let the dressing not only sit itself for a while as Cassie recommends, but also sit for a while on the salad. That way, as well as marinating, you will find salads taste better at room temperature than cold. Another delicious nutritious addition to salad is seaweed. You can find online dressing recipes for seaweed salad. You buy the seaweed dry in a bag and reconstitute it. So good. It adds a salty flavor, so use less salt if you add seaweed, which is nutritionally high. Just a caution, though: Seaweed is high in iodine, and my endocrinologist did tell me that if you have thyroid nodules (they are common), do not use concentrated iodine sources. Another delicious/nutritious addition to dressings is Miso paste. As for the salads themselves, try adding little pieces of fruit. The raw fruit/vegetable combination along with dressing is so good. Basically the honey in Cassie's dressings is supplying a sweetness that you could also get from fruit among the greens.
I love the looks of these recipes! I'm wondering if you have any general cost per serving information you could share. Thank you!
Just tried the Ranch. Great, easy and fast. I used green onions instead of the onion and chives--and added more lemon-maybe my lemons don't produce quite as much juice! Also thanks fo the tip for saving buttermilk!
Dressings look great! Except sesame-ginger, I hate that combination! I know, I know, I'm pretty much the only person in the world who doesn't like it...
I noticed you keep referring to the fat in whole-milk dairy products as "healthy fat"... just wanted to point out that this isn't supported by research (in fact quite the opposite). I know nowadays some people prefer to eat high-saturated fat diets, and certainly a little bit in dressing (or whatever food you prefer) isn't going to hurt, but it's widely accepted and supported by heaps of research that "healthy fats" are plant-based fats.
I definitely agree that plant-based fats are the healthiest fats you can have (woohoo avocado!), but I have to disagree with you that whole-milk dairy products are unhealthy fats. From all my reading, it seems the research is pointing to lessening the vilifying of saturated fat. Of course, too much of any kind of food isn't great for you (except maybe veggies). My recommendation is to eat a moderate diet of whole foods, and my healthy diet includes a moderate amount of whole fat dairy products.
Here are a few articles that reference what I'm talking about when I reference whole milk dairy products being a healthy fat:
http://time.com/4279538/low-fat-milk-vs-whole-milk/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristin-wartman/got-organic-whole-milk-ne_b_4421306.html
http://time.com/3734033/whole-milk-dairy-fat/
I do realize that many major health organizations like the AHA, Mayo Clinic, etc. still consider saturated fat an "unhealthy" fat, I personally believe that the research is starting to point in a different direction, and expect to see revised recommendations in the near future. But I totally understand how some folks would prefer to stick to the letter of what the experts say right now (which, I am, without a doubt, not).
Your body naturally knows how to process natural fats, I'm not sure that our bodies even know what to do with chemically engineered fats. Hmmm, maybe just harden in the arteries?
Yep here we are on saturated fats:
http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6340
Yay to our ancestors...And sympathy to a whole generation of elderly people suffering from more mental illnesses than ever.
These look so good! I'm trying to eat healthy during my pregnancy and every lunch I have a salad, I've been mixing it up with different salad dressings! Its been bliss.
I'm so pumped about these!!
In the past when I've made vinaigrette's though, they have separated once refrigerated and sometimes the oil has hardened so I can't shake them back together. These were made with EVOO. Any tips? Something I'm doing wrong?
Nope, you're not doing anything wrong. It's totally normal! Just let the vinaigrette warm up a little bit, and then shake again to remix—it'll be as good as new. 🙂
Thanks these are great dressing and will definitely be making them. Can you please tell me how long they can be stored in the refrigerator?
Hi, Sabi! The dressings with dairy in them will be good for at least a week in the fridge in an airtight container. The others will be good for 2+ weeks in the fridge, also in airtight containers.
So I've used grapeseed oil it dosent harden
Thanks for these! We are getting into salad in a big way so these will be a great addition. Where do you get the adorable little bottles?
I got them at a local supermarket, but they are for sale on Amazon, too: http://amzn.to/2bpMeUL
If you have beer drinkers in your family, it's actually cheaper just to buy a 4 pack (or 6 pack) or Grolsch beer and save the bottles. You can also use the beer for cooking.
I can't wait to try these! ..especially the coconut milk ranch and the lemon vinaigrette!
The coconut milk ranch was a big lifesaver when we were off dairy! It's good stuff. 🙂
What are the calories in the salad dressings? Particularly the Honey Mustard Salad Dressing?
I have made 4 of these 1c dressing's & love them? is there anyway to know how any carbs are in the dressings?
There are lots of great calorie calculators out there that you can use.