As big fans of all things salad we tend to make a lot of dressing from scratch. This one’s the easiest ever and easily one of the best. It has just three ingredients: Lime Juice, Seasoned Rice Vinegar, and Olive Oil.
For the record: we eat a lot of salad…we mean a lot of salad. Pretty much it’s what we have for dinner every night, generally with lean(ish) meat of some kind, such as grilled chicken breast (thank you George Foreman
Some years ago Julie happened across a recipe for a kind of ‘a little bit of everything salad’ that had a nummy dressing that was semi-from-scratch. It called for Good Seasons Zesty Italian Dressing mix and substituted Balsamic Vinegar for the regular stuff – it…was…awesome! We loved it. We couldn’t get enough of it. We were taking it to potlucks and telling our friends about it. In short, it was a simple stroke of genius that forever changed the way we viewed the ‘whole dressing thing’.
Since then we’ve experimented with lots of recipes (to varying degrees of success) and we’ve come up with what we guess you might call a basic formula of sorts: acid, oil, and flavoring components of one kind or another. This vinaigrette/citronette hybrid is just about the easiest dressing in the world but it’s an over-acheiver in the results department. We love it on simple green salads and it’s probably just as fantastic on grilled fish but we’ll have to get back to you about that…
(Okay, so Lemon Juice is actually the easiest dressing in the world…but Lemon Juice isn’t really a recipe, is it?)
Here’s all it is (our measurements are usually estimate-ish, but this is pretty close):
- Juice of 1/2 a Lime
- 2 Tbsp. Seasoned Rice Vinegar
- 1/4 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Whisk it all together and away you go…
The Seasoned Rice Vinegar here is very important as it’s really the backbone of this recipe, and it’s really important that you use Seasoned Rice Vinegar. Since it contains sugar and salt as well as vinegar it adds sweet and savory notes to the dressing that round out the flavor profile. The Lime Juice adds zest and freshness and the Olive Oil adds balance (as well as flavor) and cuts the acidity.
If you’ve never made your own dressing before then this should be your first attempt, verily thou shalt not be displeased.
Word!
I bought a bottle of white balsamic vinegar for a particular recipe last month – and it’s gone in just about every salad I’ve made since!
It’s been a fun experiment.
Before that, I had a bottle of mustard seed oil that was pretty awesome.
Hang on, I haven’t tried combining them yet…
cool blog. I’ve just found it and I’m really enjoying exploring it
Oooooh, White Balsamic…now that’s a vinegar we haven’t tried yet (in truth, it used to sound faintly ‘white zinfandel’-esque so we sort of always breezed past it…). And we’ve never even heard of mustard seed oil, verily we are deprived. We totally love making our own dressings, we’ll have a post soon of a No-shiitake Vinaigrette soon that was shockingly simple to make and our standby balsamic-with-anything dressing never seems to get old. Thanks so much for commenting! We’ll swing by your blog, too!
I made this vinaigrette and used it as the dressing for an Asian inspired coleslaw. It was wonderful!
As for the white balsamic…it’s not pink at all. It’s a clear more delicate version of regular balsamic. I use it often for caprese salad which I just cant leave as is and add thin slices of avacado and finely diced chives or scallion tops.