Salad Dressings

We always eat a lot of salads. This time of year I can grow lettuce and carrots outside and tomatoes in the greenhouse. I wish I had thought to plant cucumbers in pots and grow those in the greenhouse .. I will remember to do that next year. In the summer, I can grow all kinds of salad ingredients . . except lettuce. 

I never thought much about salad dressings. We buy what we want, and we use a lot of olive oil and balsamic vinegar on our salads.

For Christmas, I got this Salad Sampler from Penzey’s. We have loved making our own dressing. Today we had the Creamy Peppercorn dressing and it was delicious. The first time I made the Green Goddess, Vince said it was the best dressing he had ever had. You can mix the powdered ingredients with mayo, yogurt, sour cream. You can add sugar, vinegar . . whatever you want.

I’m loving not having 5 or 6 bottles of salad dressing in the fridge. Since we make our own  yogurt, I usually mix up about 1 cup of yogurt with 1 or 2 T. of the dressing mix, sometimes I add vinegar, sometimes I add a bit of sugar, I’ve added a bit of Sriracha. No matter what we add, the dressings have been wonderful. One cup of “base” makes enough for us each to have salads with three different meals (6 salads in all) and then I make a different batch. Pretty simple.

It doesn’t state anywhere on the Penzey’s website that I can find so I decided to figure out how many uses you get per jar. The jar that came in the sample pack says it’s 2.5 oz.

I weighed out 1 Tablespoon of powder and that weighed .4 oz. But, looking at the bottle, and thinking about how much I had used and how much was left, it looked like there was more than that in the jar so I dumped the contents, and sure enough, there’s still 3 oz. of mix in there and I’ve used it twice so it probably started out as a little less than 4 oz. 

Just for the sake of my calculations, let’s say we’re using a 3.8 oz. jar, which costs $8.69 and each batch of dressing takes .4 oz. of mix. You would get 9.5 batches of dressing. Let’s just say 9 batches because I sometimes add another sprinkle of mix. At $8.69, that’s a little less than $1 per batch for the mix. Add in the cost of a cup of mayo or sour cream or yogurt, and the price is probably comparable to most storebought dressings. We get 6 – 8 cups of Greek yogurt from a gallon of milk so the cost for 1 cup of yogurt for us is less than .20.

The taste . . you’ll just have to try it. We think the Penzey’s dressing mixes are way better than most salad dressings we’ve tried.