Salad Dressing Recipe Bon Appetit
Diante Scharsch
Always make more salad dressing than you'll need. It takes no longer to mix a big batch, and it means tomorrow night's salad will be ready in minutes. This recipe makes enough vinaigrette for three large salads.
This colorful cold noodle salad is infinitely riffable. Check out Rice Noodles With Shrimp and Coconut-Lime Dressing, Udon With Chicken and Garlicky Peanut Dressing, and Soba With Tofu and Miso-Mustard Dressing for even more ideas.
Toss noodles, steak, kohlrabi, scallions, cabbage, and cilantro in a large bowl with three-quarters of reserved dressing to combine and evenly coat; season with salt. Top with cashews and Sichuan peppercorns and drizzle remaining dressing over.
Welcome to Never Fail, a semi-regular column where we wax poetic about the recipes that never, ever let us down. This week: the homemade ranch dressing that Basically editor Amiel Stanek just couldn't live without.
How to I love thee, ranch dressing? Let me count the ways. For one, there is literally not a single person on God's Green Earth that does not like the taste of ranch dressing. It's rich. It's creamy. It's tangy. It's got subtle kick from garlic coupled with the implacable frisson of green herbs. Whether you're four or forty, from Los Angeles or Lubbock, you can get down with ranch. (Fun Fact: My friend John Nicolo once chugged a bottle of Hidden Valley on a dare, became violently ill, and still loves and eats the stuff to this day. That's what I'm talking about.) Which is to say, I know that when I make it, it's always, always going to be a dunk.
Then there's the fact that making it at home is almost as easy as opening a bottle of the store-bought stuff. (Almost.) You could use a recipe, sure, but to me the beauty of homemade ranch is how flexible the preparation is, and that the base ingredients are a) things I almost always have in the fridge and b) things that don't go bad. Mine always starts with two giant spoonfuls of rich, tangy, full-fat dairy of some kind (yogurt, sour cream, creme fraiche, and labneh all work), followed by one giant spoonful of mayo, followed by a grated clove of garlic, a big pinch of kosher salt, five or six hearty turns of freshly cracked black pepper and a good squeeze of fresh lemon juice. After that, I slowly whisk in buttermilk (kefir works too) until the whole mixture has the texture of, well, ranch dressing. And there you have it: The most basic, and delicious, homemade ranch dressing imaginable.
And if the possibilities for customizing this dressing-to-end-all-dressing are limitless, so are its applications. It's obvs the best green salad dressing there is, but more often than that I'm using it as a dip for prepped raw veggies (crudites, for you fancies), drizzling it over thick slabs of sliced tomato, or serving it alongside grilled meat (hey, what did you think the "white sauce" on a gyro was?). I use it as the dressing for cole slaw, set it out with pretzels for a party snack, and serve it with any and all things fried.
If you don't believe me, try this experiment: The next time you're serving, I don't know, anything, put out a bowl of homemade ranch, just call it "sauce," and see if people don't naturally spoon it over everything on their plate like it was gravy on Thanksgiving. Because they will. Because ranch dressing is gravy for the other 364 days of the year. And because it makes everything better, every single time.
I have never considered myself a potato salad person - primarily because of my lifelong dislike for mayonnaise. The oddest part is that I love all of the individual ingredients that go into mayo. Eggs? Good. Lemon juice? Great. Olive oil? Why not. While I've warmed up to the stuff over the years, it's still not something that I like to chow down on in large quantities. So therein lies my challenge with classic American-style potato salad.
About five years ago I stumbled across a Barefoot Contessa french-style potato salad recipe that called for a vinaigrette dressing. YES PLEASE! Ina opened up my eyes to a whole new potato salad world for my anti-mayo tastebuds. I'll share that life-changing recipe which has become a staple soon.
So imagine my excitement when I received my Bon Appetit July edition with a Smashed Fingerling + Jalapeo Potato Salad on the front cover. There was nary a lick of mayo in sight. This is great as a side dish for so many mains - ribs, chicken, steak, you name it. It's great consumed warm but I think it would be just as tasty if it was at room temp or cool.
I always try to make my vinaigrette first so that the flavors have time to meld together. Whisk vinegar and mustard in a large bowl. Gradually whisk in cup oil until emulsified; season with salt and pepper.
Let your potatoes cool slightly, then lightly flatten. I had some fun with this step and used my neglected meat tenderizer to do the trick. Any heavy item (even the palm of your hand with some pressure) would work here.
As the kid of two working parents, I grew up eating plenty of boxed macaroni, Lunchables, and frozen pizza bites. But there were a few things my mom always made from scratch, and salad dressing was one of them. Her go-to was a parsley vinaigrette. It went on everything we ate: tuna, roasted vegetables, cold bean salads, and sliced red peppers (my childhood "salad" of choice). I discovered Ranch at my best friend's house, Thousand Island at the local pizza place, but in our house it was always this vinaigrette. I don't know how to describe the taste other than to say it's like sticking your face in a parsley plant and taking a huge deep breath. Oh, and it's really good.
Time passed, and I made mistakes in life and in cooking. I broke my food processor. I lost my tablespoon under the fridge. I went on a misguided diet and stopped eating salad dressing, a great personal tragedy I'd rather forget. When I came back to reality, I let go of a lot of food rules. Without even thinking about it, I started messing with the vinaigrette. It calls for cup red wine vinegar, but sometimes I used white. I doubled and tripled the 1 Tbsp of Dijon, because Dijon is a godly condiment. The teaspoon of sugar became a splooch of honey or a drop of maple syrup. The handful of parsley was usually handfuls, plural, and rarely did all the stems get removed. I upped the salt and pepper to taste when I learned that "too salty" is not a thing. And that cup olive oil was as much as I could get in the little hole of my shitty replacement food processor.
If you've been cooking for a while or spent time with a lot of Mark Bittman recipes, maybe this isn't a revelation to you. But it took me close to a decade of salad dressings to figure it out, and if I can save you even some of that time, I'm willing to look like an amateur in front of all my Bon Apptit colleagues. And, while I'm at it, let me admit that raw red peppers are still my salad of choice.
No summer backyard barbecue is complete without side dishes to complement your main grilled attractions. We wanted to find fresh takes on classic sides that could be made ahead of time and would also hold up well at room or outdoor temperature. Coincidentally, our friends at Bon Apptit recently published an article "70 Memorial Day Side Dishes That Eclipse the Mains" featuring summer sides that fit this bill. Francis Lam joined Claire Saffitz in the Bon Apptit test kitchen as she prepared two of her favorite recipes for Romesco Pasta Salad with Basil and Parmesan and Charred Bean and Pea Salad.
Claire Saffitz: Are you thinking about the macaroni salad with the pieces of hard carrot in it? The mayo-y one? I totally agree. It's like pasta salad should be the most delicious thing at your picnic or your barbecue, but so often it's weirdly sweet, gloppy and thick, and the pasta's really mushy.
The first thing was not using a mayo base. When I first tested the recipe, I tried a really bright vinaigrette. Another thing I realized was that when you eat the pasta cold a lot of those flavors are muted, so you have to make a punchier, more acidic, more heavily seasoned and flavorful dressing. We went with a dressing that's sort of based on romesco; it uses garlic, toasted walnuts and jarred roasted peppers that are all blended together with olive oil and lemon juice. It gives body and substance to the sauce. Like you would get with mayo, but it doesn't have that same heaviness. Another tip is dress the pasta salad with half of the dressing if you're going to make it in advance because you need to take it somewhere. Then right before serving add the rest of the dressing and toss it through. Because, you're right, it does continue to absorb all of those flavors and the dressing, so it can get almost dry.
I have here everything ready to go and I'm just going to finish tossing everything together. I have the pasta that's half-dressed, the remainder of the dressing, some Parmesan, and chopped fresh tomatoes. We figured this is summertime, it's getting into prime tomato season and we wanted that other fresh element that will add juiciness and make it more bright. We pulled some of the walnuts out from the dressing and chopped those up. The idea here was to create something with a lot of texture. And finally, some toasted breadcrumbs.
FL: Handfuls of toasted breadcrumbs! Not even tasting it, I think I feel it because the pasta itself is going to be cooked ahead of time. The problem with pasta salad is usually the mush factor. Here, you're adding the crunchy breadcrumbs and crunchy nuts. You're adding all these different layers of texture so it almost distracts you from the pasta.
CS: Mission accomplished. It's very bright. There's a lot of acid. I love raw garlic, especially in summertime, so there is some raw garlic blended into the dressing that's giving it an assertive flavor.
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