What To Do If Your Salad Dressing Is Too Sweet

Making homemade salad dressing can be fun and challenging at the same time. It takes a lot of experimenting to get the perfect taste and texture whether you're making a caesar, garden, or grilled chicken salad.

Love My Salad boasts all the great reasons to prepare your salad dressing from scratch. For one, you know it's fresh, as it hasn't been sitting on a grocery store shelf. You also know exactly what ingredients are present in your dressing. Store-bought salad dressings can have additives and fillers that might be hard to identify. Most of the time, homemade dressing tastes better because you can adjust it to your liking, and if you buy the right ingredients, it can also be much more affordable.

Making homemade salad dressing is much easier with the right ingredients. Our homemade dressing guide offers a range of recipes from maple to chipotle and even pumpkin. When making your own dressing you may run into a few problems getting the flavor just right, but luckily there's a great fix for when your sauce is too sweet.

Quick fixes for the perfect dressing

Although making your own salad dressing comes with many benefits, there are also challenges associated with getting the right recipe. One commonly asked question is: what if my salad dressing turns out too sweet?

Dressing that is too sweet can be evened out with something savory, such as soy sauce, capers, miso, and tahini. Garlic Delight recommends tasting the dressing as you go to prevent making the mix too sugary. Depending on the type of salad you're making, many forms of sweetener can be used, including fruit juice, honey, or maple syrup, adding a different flavor than plain sugar will.

Another way of reducing the sweet taste of your salad dressing is by adding salt. This method needs to be done carefully, however, because it's definitely possible to add too much salt. If this happens, Cooking Light recommends using one of the sugar alternatives mentioned above, or simply making a larger batch of dressing by adding everything else but salt.