In the world of leafy green salads and crisp vegetables, few things are as satisfying -- and simple -- as the one-two punch of oil and vinegar. But once you start adding extra flavors and emulsifying, it's just as easy to make a creamy dressing that's a perfect accompaniment to the fresh flavors of spring. It's even easier, in fact, because there is no tried and true ingredients ratio for the perfect dressing -- it's all a matter of preference and desire, be it for something thick and creamy, milky, or somewhere in between.

The nutty tang of crème fraîche forms the foundation of this dressing, though sour cream, yogurt, mayonnaise or even tofu can be used instead. We find that mixing one part mayonnaise with two parts crème fraîche achieves a crisp and pronounced balance of flavors.

When making salad dressings, ever wonder why oil and vinegar mix well in some cases and not in others? Find out how to make the perfect salad dressing with two simple ingredients, and maybe just a few more.

A good salad dressing is one that doesn't separate. When making salad dressing, some of us shake, some of us whisk, and no few of us cruet. All of these methods, though tried and true, work on some dressings, but at your local kitchen store you can get a gadget that works on all of them: the Bonjour Salad Chef. The Salad Chef is a hand-held blender consisting of a power unit with a touch button on the top, from which emerges a long stem with a set of high-impact plastic blades on the business end, which when engaged spin at extra-high speed to emulsify salad dressing.

Emuslification is a science-fair-sounding word that refers to the suspension of acid in oil. Creating it is a matter of technique: the oil and acid which you mixed in a ratio (approximately two-thirds oil to one-third acid) combine with flavorful ingredients to incorporate into a sauce which maintains its consistency. The only way to create emulsification is effort. For vinaigrettes, whisking is usually sufficient. For a heavy dressing, some shake ingredients together in a lidded jar -- adherents swear that this is the only way to make a creamy dressing such as blue cheese.

I promise I am not typing this from the copy on the box, but the Bonjour Salad Chef does its job perfectly. I have tried it on every kind of dressing I make: lemony washes for arugula, vinaigrettes from shallot to balsamic to pear, hearty olivata for Greek salad, burly Worchestershire dressing for Cobb salad, even red-wine dressing for beef salad. The Chef works best when the ingredients are placed in the bottom of a mid-sized bowl, and the Chef is lowered into them, whisking from the center outwards. Salad dressing should be fresh, but a dijon vinaigrette I made for this column held together six hours (refrigerated) before starting to separate.

As a bit of a veggie fiend, I eat a lot of salads. While I rarely change up the ingredients in the salad mix, I sometimes like to change up the dressing, because the same ol' vinaigrette or caesar dressing can get old after a while. One of the best and easiest flairs that I've found for salad dressing is mustard seeds.

After toasting them on a skillet, you just grind them up, like you see above, and add them into your dressing. The ground mustard seeds give a smoky depth to the dressing and brings a great added flavor to the dish. The seeds above were used as part of a great Mustard Seed Dressing recipe that I picked out of The Big Book of Backyard Cooking, and you can check it out after the jump.

The salad season has begun for me, and I noticed these new Wish-Bone Bountifuls salad dressings at the supermarket the other day. They're flavorful, low fat, low calorie dressings that have real pieces of vegetables and fruits in them.

Sound good? Well, you can go to the store and buy a bottle of the dressing, then log in to their web site and sign up to get a mail-in rebate. The offer is good between May 30 and June 1 only.

While you're at the site, you can also plant a "digital garden." It's part of Wish-Bones campaign to get people to eat more salads and get healthier. The nature sound effects at the site are rather relaxing...

I feel like I'm revealing some deep, dark secret, but here goes: I microwave my salads.

Now, this isn't because I like my lettuce and carrots and salad dressing really hot, it's because of bacteria. I started doing this a couple of years ago, when we had all those recalls and scares involving pre-made bagged salads and spinach. I make my salad on a plate then zap it for about 20 seconds. Just enough to kill something but not make the salad get hot and shrivel.

Now, I have to stress that I have no idea if 20 seconds in the microwave will even do anything to destroy bacteria, but it makes me feel good anyway.

I now return you to your normal Slashfood posts.

You ever have one of those days when you're not sure what you want to have to eat? You're trying to decide between pizza or maybe pasta or maybe go the healthy route and have a salad. Well, now you don't have to decide.

This recipe for Pizza Pasta Salad has everything: you have your penne pasta, your tomatoes, your pepperoni, your salami, your mozzarella cheese, even Italian salad dressing and Parmesan cheese. Sounds like a recipe that you can experiment with.

(OK, it's not the healthy salad route mentioned above but it sounds pretty good.)

And I guess I should clarify by what I mean by "fat-free foods." I'm not talking about foods that are naturally fat-free, such as celery or water (those are the first two examples that come to mind). I mean foods that usually have a fat version but also have a fat-free version. On to the list (and yes, I'm well aware that fat-free doesn't necessarily mean healthy and can often be higher in sugar).

1. Fat-Free Milk: If you had asked me ten years ago that today I'd be drinking fat-free milk instead of whole milk, I would have thought you were crazy. But I love it, and in fact, can't even drink whole milk anymore. Tastes too thick and heavy for me.

It's Labor Day Weekend, so the side salads are going to be coming out full-force at BBQs around the country. Thankfully, the San Francisco Chronicle's Taster's Choice taste-tested bottled Ranch dressings so you can pick up a good one to save yourself a little time and energy. Strangely enough, their top two picks were store brands, Safeway and Albertson's, with the Safeway brand scoring enough points to earn itself a spot in the Taster's Choice Hall of Fame. Bottled Ranch; who knew? The dressings and their scores out of 100 are listed below:

• Safeway 81
• Albertsons 68
• Toby's 58
• T. Marzetti 57
• Hidden Valley 56
• Wish-Bone 35
• Ken's Steak House 30
• Litehouse 27
• Marie's 24
• Kraft 21
• Annie's Naturals 20
• Newman's Own 15
• Trader Joe's 14

We all know that a certain fast food restaurant carries a line of salads in shakers. The premise is that you fill the container with all your salad ingredients, pour in a separate container of dressing, close the lid and shake. After a minute, you salad is completely dressed and ready to eat out of the same container.

The Salad Blaster is a reusable, dishwasher safe way to take advantage of this technique in your own home - or better yet, in your lunch at school or at the office. The Blaster has a reservoir in the lid that holds the dressing, while the base contains all your salad fixings. Simply press the top bottom to dispense the dressing into the salad, shake and your lunch is ready to eat, though you will have to provide your own fork.

It's ok to put a little butter on your corn on the cob and add a bit more dressing to that salad. The nutrients in some vegetables are fat soluble and are absorbed much better by the body when accompanied by a little fat. A study conducted at Ohio State University, found that the absorption of nutrients was not only higher when accompanied by fats, but that it was actually minimized when the fat-free foods were eaten alone.

Previous studies have shown the same results in rats, but this study followed the nutrient absorption of human diets. It was a follow-up to a 2004 study that tracked nutrient absorption when comparing low fat salad dressings to fat-free ones. In this one, salsas and salads were served to participants with and without avocado. Absorption of beta carotene jumped by up to 18 times the amount, and lycopene jumped as much as 7 when the avocado was included, even controlling for the nutrients added by the avocado itself.

When we think about food porn, the things that come to mind are decadent chocolate cakes, perfectly topped pizzas and sweet sorbets. But can salad be food porn? Of course it can, because food porn is about making the food look good and an array of fresh, colorful veggies almost always does. We saw a beautiful wedge salad once before, for example, but this Caesar Salad from Celia at English Patis deserves special attention. Not only is it simple and satisfying, but the homemade dressing topping it off is easy to make. It does not start off with eggs and oil, but uses mayonnaise as a base, so busy home chefs, as well as inexperienced ones, will always be able to whip up some caesar dressing before dinner.

F

From the creator of the Ultimate Bacon Sandwich comes the latest in bacon-saturated dining: bacon cereal. This isn't bacon flavored cereal bits or bacon-shaped rice puffs. It is a bowl of chopped up bacon (one full pound) with blue cheese dressing acting as "milk" and bacon bits on top - like a wedge salad, in a bowl, without the formality of lettuce. The chef had this to say about eating it: "I'm not sure how to describe the feeling of eating this. It was far worse than the Ultimate Bacon Sandwich. It probably compares to being electrocuted while having your wisdom teeth removed by a back alley dentist. My tongue burned with each bite from the sodium content. I was certain that I couldn't finish the entire bowl, at least not without severe intestinal repercussions. But, I knew that under no circumstance was I ever going to do this again so it's a one shot deal. The last bite went down about as smoothly as a pile of broken glass, but I made it. "

I'm sensing a new challenge for competitive eaters everywhere, not to mention the reason that iceberg lettuce is so vital to the wedge

[via Supersized Meals]

While bottled salad dressings are easy to get, not to mention that they can be found everywhere, a homemade dressing just seems to taste better. A simple vinaigrette takes on more flavor from the care you put into it and the fresh herbs that you can toss into a creamy dressing will blow away most things you can buy. The Best 50 Salad Dressings is a book that can give you a start on making your own dressings at home, something which isn't nearly as difficult as it sounds. It's a small book, on 78 pages, so it gets right to the point. With 50 recipes to choose from, you're sure to find at least one or two  you like and since the book is only $5.95, you'll get your money's worth just from that. There are vinaigrettes, creamy buttermilk and blue cheese dressings and fat-free choices, too. There are some basic ingredients (oils, mustard, vinegars, garlic, lemon, etc) that you need that will get you through most of the recipes and once you have those on hand, you are only 5 minutes away from dressing.

Beyond the dressings themselves, there are some serving suggestions from appetizers, entrees and sides that will help you find uses for your new favorite flavors beyond adding them to a bowl of greens.

 

 

I imagine that there are people in the world who eat Miracle Whip otherwise it wouldn't have so much coveted supermarket shelf space. But, what I want to know is: who? Who are the people that buy the Miracle Whip? 'Cuz, in my opinion, it's the most disgusting condiment ever created. It's even grosser than Kraft "Sandwich Spread" or green ketchup. It calls itself a "salad dressing," but I couldn't imagine glopping it on to a salad. (It almost makes me gag just thinking about it.)

Miracle Whip looks like mayonnaise, but it's so not. Upon close inspection, it is dotted with grains of paprika—that is one way to tell that it is not mayonnaise. The other way is to (blerf) taste it. It is tongue-meltingly tangy and overly cloying at the same time. Once you taste it, it is impossible to remove the after-taste from your mouth. It coats your tongue with its saccharine unpleasantness...blech. Totally heave-making. I just can't see how its overpowering sweetness would add anything to any dish in which it is used. But I know you Miracle Whip-lovers are out there. So tell me, why do you like it? And what do you eat it on...er, with?