I know that this sounds like a crime against nature, but please bear with me. I’ve got a bottle of salad dressing (store brand, BTW) that tastes fine, except for the fact that the flavor is way too strong. Literally, any more than a drop or two on the entire salad and the taste is so overpowering that I’m gasping. I’d like to be able to thin the stuff out so that I can be able to enjoy the mixture of flavors that a salad dressing is supposed to be able to provide. Any suggestions? This particular dressing a ginger sesame flavor, but all the dressings from this store are the same way.
I’m not sure if water would help. Is it a creamy dressing or an oil based? Maybe some oil and vinegar and/or sugar would mellow it out. If it is creamy or you don’t mind turning into something like that, you could add a bit of it to mayonnaise or miracle whip to make a lighter tasting salad dressing.
The first ingredient on the listing is corn syrup, which if I remember my labelling laws correctly, means that 50% of the stuff is corn syrup. I didn’t figure that water would be necessarily good to add to it, since that might inhibit everything from mixing together.
Use the Blender and vegetable oil for an oil based dressing, and mayonaise plus vegetable oild for cream dressings.
If a little bit of mustard would work with the flavoring of the particular salad dressing, you can use that as an emulsifier to keep the ingredients from separating out, if you’d like.
Umm… hijacking, huh?? Where does it say that in any labelling laws??
What I know about ordering of the ingredients is that they should be listed from the ingredient that is used most (whether by weight or by volume, not sure,) and decreasing in order.
what happens if there’s nothing that’s 50 percent of it… they have to list SOMETHING first, don’t they??
You may be right. I’ve not sat down and read the laws regarding product labelling, only various articles which discuss them, so I could be wrong.
labelling laws require ingredients to be listed in order of most mass to least mass. Corn syrup is not neccesarily 50% but it’s more than the 2nd ingredient.
Is the overwhelming taste sesame? Because that is a strong and cloying taste and it might be impossible to reduce that flavor. My suggestion would be to make a an appropriate quantity of a standard 3 to 1 vinigrette (1 part vinegar, 3 parts oil) and add a tablespoon of the dressing to that. It might do the trick and be more subtle.
There’s no single dominating taste, and it certainly doesn’t taste as sweet as having corn syrup be the primary ingredient as one would might think.
Canola oil and rice vinegar should dilute it without altering the nature of the taste too much. Add a bit of each, and then adjust salt, etc., to taste.
Have you tried just using a tiny bit of it, and tossing the salad more thoroughly? (Most people put way too much dressing on salads, if you ask me.) You could even toss it into a small batch of the salad and then toss that into the rest.
I’ve tried that, but the stuff is thick and it’s difficult to get it to spread out evenly. So you either wind up with no flavor, or too much flavor.
What lissener said. Add some rice vinegar (which has a milder and more neutral taste than wine vinegars)and it will dilute the impact without the taste becoming watery. I you like the sweetness of balsamic vinegars you might try one of those as well. I do this all the time to stretch one or two tablespoons of salad dressing over a large (well huge actually) salad without losing too much taste and without adding significant calories. You can mix the dressing and vinegar together but I usually just sprinkle it (the vinegar on directly) as my method of covering the salad bowl and shaking it like crazy gets dressing on pretty much every piece of salad.