- Steve Jackson Photography via Flickr
Store bought dressings tend to ruin your salads and dishes. It's not that they taste bad, but they overload your food with unnecessary calories and fat. According to the book Eat This Not That: Supermarket Survival Guide (David Zinczenko; Rodale Books, 2008) Hidden Valley Ranch Original has 140 calories and 14 grams of fat per serving (2 tablespoons). You may have guessed that ranch dressing is high in fat and calories, but what about store bought vinaigrettes? The same book states that Newman's Own Balsamic has 90 calories and 9 grams of fat per serving. The book does list one low-calorie and fat dressing, Ken's Lite Accent Italian Vinaigrette, but then warns that it, "contains a chemist's list of ingredients."
Why should you sacrifice your health or weight on store bought dressings, when it is simple, not to mention fast, to whip up your own at home? You can make a dressing as easily as adding equal parts of oil and vinegar (or to your taste) to a bottle and shaking or by infusing herbs and spices into a vinaigrette by gently heating them in a saucepan on you stove. Though olive and canola oil do contain about 120 calories per tablespoon, a key to cutting calories is to not drown your salad in dressing in the first place.
Here I used three different techniques to create four different vinaigrettes:
This article appears in Aug 4-10, 2011.