12 Mistakes Everyone Makes When Making Homemade Vinaigrette

Vinegar, which comes from the French word vin aigre, meaning "sour wine,” has been used medicinally and as a food preservative since the time of Hippocrates. Nowadays, while still used both for its healing properties and to preserve certain foods, vinegar often serves as the base for many salad dressings, and is a necessary component when making a homemade vinaigrette.

Whether mindful eating or pinching pennies is your goal, making vinaigrette from scratch is an easy way to accomplish both. In order to prolong the shelf life of store-bought salad dressings, many commercial brands contain unhealthy ingredients like additives, genetically modified organisms, saturated fats, sodium, sugar, and more. Even a classic fat-free Wish-Bone Italian dressing may appear to be a healthy alternative in the salad dressing aisle, but it contains some questionable ingredients including caramel color, sodium benzoate, and calcium disodium EDTA.

However, the main ingredients on any Italian dressing label, such as the popular Olive Garden Italian, include things like distilled white vinegar, Italian herbs, garlic, salt, sugar, Romano cheese, and oil, which are common items found in almost every home kitchen and therefore make this an easy dressing to recreate at home, minus some unhealthy attributes like soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup. Not all homemade vinaigrettes are created equal, and in order to make your salad a healthy component of any meal, we've rounded up some mistakes to avoid when making vinaigrette dressing from scratch.

Before understanding what the wrong oil means for homemade salad dressing, it's important to know what oils are recommended in a vinaigrette based on their unique color, aroma and taste. Extra virgin olive oil is hands down the most common oil recommended for homemade recipes due to its herbaceous notes and potential health benefits (via We Olive).

Other neutral-tasting oils like avocado, grapeseed, canola, or vegetable are recommended as well, and may even be combined with olive oil to make the oil flavor in the vinaigrette more subtle, and it can also be a cost-effective way to save money as neutral oils tend to be cheaper than olive oil.

More robust-tasting oils like coconut, sesame, and walnut are considerably rich for any given standard salad, but could be used for their unique flavor profile in culturally-specific salads such as adding a teaspoon of sesame oil to an Asian-inspired salad, or coconut oil to a fruit-forward salad. Infused oil is another distinctly flavorful option that should also be used in moderation.

We've all heard the idiom that water and oil don't mix as a way to say two things don't belong together, and in actuality, it's true. According to the University of California Los Angeles Science and Food blog, in terms of homemade vinaigrette, the vinegar serves as the liquid substance, and similar to water, it won't merge with oil as the two ingredients tend to separate due to their polar and nonpolar molecules. More simply put, oil and vinegar will always have an aversion to one another, unless there's another ingredient to stabilize the emulsion.

The good news is, adding an emulsifier is a relatively simple trick to bond the ingredients in your homemade salad dressing. Common emulsifiers added to salad dressings include garlic, mustard, egg yolk, tomato paste, and honey. One important technique in successfully adding an emulsifier is to whisk, shake, or blend it into the vinegar at a high speed, and add in the oil slowly while continuing to whisk or blend the ingredients together. This ensures the oil, vinegar, and emulsifier will bond together and result in a smooth, homemade vinaigrette.

According to The Flour Handprint, buying oils with a harvest or production date listed on the bottle is crucial in order to ensure the oil is fresh. There are also certification councils that label bottles accordingly to protect consumers from purchasing rancid or expired oils. Unlike other food products, cooking oils do not include an expiration date, and rather list a "best if used by" date, which means the oil is best if used by the date recommended, and will lose its quality past that date, but will still be safe to consume (via Our Everyday Life).

The best way to determine freshness is to observe the color, taste, and smell of the oil before adding it to your homemade vinaigrette. If the oil appears cloudy, or it smells and tastes bitter, it has most likely gone bad. The best way to prevent oil from going bad is to use it by the recommended date on the bottle, and to store it in a cool, dry place. Certain oils, such as olive and walnut, tend to expire faster than others and are best stored in the refrigerator.

Whipping up a homemade vinaigrette for one-time use is simple and easy, but if you're going to go through the task of measuring ingredients, rinsing and chopping herbs, and whisking it all together, you may as well make enough for another meal. According to Eat by Date, vinegar-based salad dressings may last up to three or four weeks in the refrigerator, depending on the ingredients. If fresh herbs or citrus have been incorporated in the vinaigrette, the shelf life is shortened to one or two weeks.

If you've made a large batch of vinaigrette with plenty of leftovers, Premeditated Leftovers recommends repurposing the dressing as a marinade on meats. The best way to reduce food waste using this method is to divide the meat into separate containers, add the dressing, and freeze or consume it immediately. Another option for leftover vinaigrette is to add it to tuna or chicken salad, or to use it as a dressing on a sandwich or wrap.

Although it may seem fun to play around with different flavors and textures in your vinaigrette, there is such a thing as going overboard with ingredients, so it's best to follow the Food Network's advice by keeping your recipe simple and basic. One of your goals in making homemade vinaigrette should be to scale back on overcomplicated ingredients like those listed on the back of store-bought labels, so the basic rule of thumb is to follow the acid, oil, emulsifier, and flavorings rule. When using an acid, choose either vinegar or citrus, not necessarily both as you don't want the vinaigrette to turn out overly acidic.

For a simple guideline on what ingredients to include in your dressing, keep it simple as Tasting Table recommends in order to achieve your desired flavor. In each of their five healthy dressings, the recipes do not surpass six ingredients at most, which include salt and pepper, and most can be thrown together with common pantry items.

Consuming the same salad and dressing every day or week will likely get old, so it's important to mix it up if your goal is to consume more greens and stick with it. With so many different types of greens and vegetable combinations out there, it's important to pair the right dressing flavors with the ingredients of your salad. Honey and Lime offers a complete guide to pairing the right greens with the right dressing.

For example, bitter, peppery greens such as arugula, endive, and frisee require a sweeter vinaigrette made with honey or maple syrup. Softer greens tend to wilt when tossed with heavy vinegar-based dressings, so a lighter olive oil, lemon, and herb dressing pairs best with tender greens like spinach and butter leaf lettuce. A strong-flavored vinaigrette will pair best with stronger leafy greens like kale or crisp lettuce such as romaine. Dash of Sanity also recommends using kale with more potent dressings like a sesame vinaigrette, or other tangy, full-bodied dressings that pack a flavorful punch.