Ban the bottles: DIY dressings taste fresher

By Jill Wendholt Silva

McClatchy Newspapers

I was weaned on bottled dressings poured over iceberg lettuce salads.

There were three basic choices. When my two younger brothers dared to drizzle dressing on their salads — and most of the time they chose (shiver) dry lettuce — they adorned it with something called “Catalina,” a vivid orange, very sweet dressing.

My personal favorite was blue cheese, or as we called it at my house, Roquefort. Our feisty Boston toy terrier, Pepi, loved both kinds of salad dressing, if not the lettuce that frequently fell off my brothers’ forks.

Finally, there was Italian, but that was strictly for grown-ups. Even kids who weren’t weaned on soda pop craved sweet things. Clearly salad dressings had more hidden sugars than we knew.

During the ’70s, salad bars were all the rage, but despite the addition of imitation bacon crumbles, fried chow-mein noodles, broccoli tufts and showers of sunflower seeds, the dressings were less than imaginative and heavy enough to drown even the sturdiest romaine.

In the ’80s, ranch was the rage, and the pickiest (or most weight-conscious) of my college roommates started asking for dressing on the side. I didn’t need to watch my girlish figure back then, so I poured it on, figuring rationing salad dressing was absolutely no way to go through life.

When I started buying my own groceries, I bought fancier jarred dressings in search of better flavors to adorn my boutique salad greens. But my taste buds eventually tired of the gloppy concoctions I brought home that usually went to waste in the back of the fridge.

As a newlywed, I received a copy of a cookbook by the Colorado Junior League titled “Creme de Colorado Cookbook.” After taking my first tentative steps at bringing salads to potlucks, I dutifully began to write down the responses to each salad and its respective dressing in the book.

More recently I began to realize that it wasn’t the salads per se that were winning raves — it was the dressing. Sure, it helped that the underlying salad had evolved to a sophisticated spring mix of lettuces with richer colors and flavors. Today I still rely heavily on five go-to dressing recipes from the “Creme” cookbook.

I have found these recipes work on just about any salad I whip up using ingredients I have pulled out of the refrigerator and pantry. If I were banished to a deserted island, I would add an Asian-inspired recipe as well, but otherwise these pretty much have me covered.

I put the dressings into heavy rotation for two weeks at the holidays when we had family visiting from Brazil. At the end of their stay, my nephew said the thing he would miss most about the meals I prepared were the nightly salads.

To my taste buds, homemade vinaigrettes taste better than store-bought dressings with lots of emulsifiers and preservatives, sodium and sugar. Most of these homemade dressings will last three to five days in the refrigerator.