The Best Homemade Salad Dressing Calls For Ice

When preparing to make a homemade salad dressing, you probably think of common ingredients like oil, vinegar, and garlic. But if you want to dress your salads like the professionals do, you need to take advantage of one simple thing that you already have in your freezer: ice. Adding an ice cube or two to your dressing prevents any herbs from browning and creates a smoother, more even texture.

Most salad dressings are made with oil and water, which famously don't mix together easily. For best results, you want to create an emulsion, which happens when droplets of vinegar get caught inside the oil. When you're making a thick dressing, a blender is often required, but the heat created by blending can lead to broken emulsion and brown herbs. Adding ice counteracts the friction and heat caused by blending, keeping your herbs bright and preventing the oil and vinegar from separating.

Ice also works wonders when you're simply shaking your dressing rather than blending it. Placing one ice cube in the dressing before you shake it up will help the oil and vinegar mix together evenly, giving you a silky and chilled final product. With this simple hack, you'll never again wonder why salad always seems to taste better at restaurants than when you make it yourself. Chances are, the chef at your favorite eatery uses ice cubes in their dressing, too.

Once you've achieved the perfect texture and temperature, you might be looking for other ways to take your salad dressing recipe to the next level. If you normally opt for a simple vinaigrette, try expanding your horizons with a creamy green goddess dressing, which typically has a yogurt, mayonnaise, or sour cream base. You can also experiment with using different sources of acidity. Lemon juice and vinegar are many people's go-to options, but orange juice, pickle juice, and grapefruit juice are other examples of tangy liquids that will bring their own unique flavor to your dressing.

If you find that your homemade salad dressing never turns out quite right even with tasty ingredients and when using the ice cube hack, you might be making a common ratio mistake. For dressing that is neither too acidic nor too greasy, always use three parts oil to one part vinegar, no matter what other extra ingredients you add into the mix.