#vinaigrette

#vinaigrette

If you're trying to increase the presence of veggie-packed salads in your life but feel held back, it could be your dressing that's making you feel iffy. Bottled salad dressings are usually loaded with preservatives, saturated fat, sugar, and salt, turning a healthy midday meal into a processed food nightmare. That's why the secret to fresh, healthy, and downright-delicious salad comes down to one thing: a great homemade dressing.

A really simple way to give those vinaigrettes an upgrade is to incorporate some kind of fresh fruit into them. Whether it's a French-inspired raspberry vinaigrette or just a squeeze of orange in your usual recipe, fruit juice can add a pleasant zing and freshness to your salad, and the natural sweetness will help balance out any acidity. But while citrus and stone fruits may seem like the obvious choice, there's one unlikely fruit you need to try: blueberries.

Giada De Laurentiis is a seemingly never-ending source of genius cooking hacks, as per her TikTok account and other social media platforms. One of her best tips involves making your own salad dressing from scratch rather than grabbing a store-bought version that's overrun with preservatives and stabilizers. In an Instagram video, De Laurentiis shares her recipe for homemade vinaigrette which includes the special ingredient of lemon and oregano salt.

If you've ever cut beets, you know how easily their juices flow, often staining your hands maroon. Naturally, they impart their color and sweet, savory flavors into the canning liquid. While a sugary recipe will enhance existing sweetness, a briny liquid balances the beets' natural sweetness and emphasizes earthiness. Either way, this leftover beet juice will make for a colorful and flavorful salad dressing that can easily boost complexity.

For a meal that fully embodies the gifts of summer, there is little better than a tomato salad. Fresh from the garden, fragrant tomatoes picked at the height of the season don't need much else to become a lovely salad, as this two-ingredient tomato and onion salad recipe proves. But if you really want to take your tomato salad to the next level, cookbook author Justine Doiron suggests that a little sweetness is exactly what you're looking for.

Butter and salt aim to enhance corn's rich taste, but lemon juice is an ingredient that really makes the vegetable stand out. The citrus adds a zesty quality to corn, brightening the juicy kernels. Lemon's tart taste has an undercurrent of sweetness to it, so it doesn't reduce corn's honeyed flavor. Instead, it enhances it while providing the veggie with an acidic boost.

Pepperoncini brine makes an exceptional homemade vinaigrette, offering bright acidity, bold saltiness, and subtle pepper flavors that enhance a variety of salads.