I thought I would bring you a little restaurant indulgence this week and I am really excited to finally share this recipe with you! It is one that I have been tweaking and working on over the last couple years and this fall I finally got it.
Olive Garden probably isn’t the fanciest restaurant in the world, but I think everyone would agree they totally nailed it when they created their house salad dressing. It is so addicting! And conveniently too, considering they do that whole all you can eat salad thing before your dinner comes!
When they started selling their famous salad dressing by the bottle I used to save up to buy it (think college years…). But really that bottle that I thought I was being so healthy pouring over a nice salad for lunch, was full of blood sugar spiking high fructose corn syrup, and toxic, rancid soybean oil, among other additives.
I started making my own salad dressings when I started my real food journey years ago, and as it turns out, many popular dressings at the store like Ranch, French, and Thousand Island are so fast to make at home with safer, more nourishing ingredients. This dressing comes together super quick and truly tastes just like the one from the restaurant! Don’t be afraid to serve it to the kids too – I pack it in my kindergartener’s lunch and my 3 year old devours it and likes to use it for dip with veggie sticks.
Get a pot of spaghetti going on the stove and let me show you how to make your own Olive Garden dressing for the salads and you can have an Italian night out at home!
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Ingredients
- 1 cup avocado oil
(Or combo avocado oil & olive oil. I get my avocado oil at Costco.)
- ¼ cup white wine vinegar
- ¼ cup water
- 2 TB mayonnaise (homemade preferable to avoid toxic oils)
- 1 TB Italian dressing mix (this is not Italian seasoning – use salad dressing mix – my recipe is super quick to mix up! Go to the Italian dressing in THIS post and use the mix.)
- ½ tsp garlic powder
- Optional ¼ cup Parmesan cheese (I often make it without and it is just as delicious without if you can’t do the dairy! This batch did not have the cheese so you can see it is still creamy and delicious.)
Instructions
- Everything into a jar and use an immersion blender
to mix. If you don’t have an immersion blender, you can put all of the ingredients into a food processor
except the oil. Then use the oil drip spout on your food processor to add the oil in to emulsify in the dressing slowly.
- This recipe makes a good pint of dressing. Store the dressing in the refrigerator up to 2 weeks.
