Keto * Low-Carb Salad Dressings

I was never a salad dressing person. I wasn’t even a salad person at all until I started Original-Atkins Induction for the first time. When I had little to eat but meat, cheese, eggs and the like, my two allotted daily salads were a treat rather than a chore.

Dana Carpender (author of many low-carb cookbooks) called store-bought dressings a ‘bad fat minefield.’ What’s a bad fat? For us Ketonians (people on Keto * Low-Carb), we follow the science. Heavily refined vegetable oils, though cheap and beloved of food manufactures, are not good fats. Bad fats cause inflammation which causes diseases that none of us want. Chapter 4 in the book Real Food Keto (link below) covers the skinny on fats. 

Some good fats are things like the fats in meat, particularly that in grass-fed meat. (I’ve made home-made mayonnaise with bacon fat instead of some other fat— it was great.) EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil) is a fat even your conventionally-oriented medical person will allow you to have. Coconut oil and MCT oil are good for getting you in ketosis. Since you will be refrigerating your salad dressing until you finish consuming it, you won’t want to use the coconut oil since it is solid at room temperature (except in a warm summer) but MCT oil, though pricy, is a good choice. I often use about a tablespoon of MCT oil and the rest EVOO when making dressings. Avocado oil and toasted sesame oil are also acceptable choices if they are COLD-PRESSED. (Not ‘cold-processed.’) Butter, when made into ghee, is a good fat which you might also use. (When I make ghee, which I plan to do soon, I may try adding some to a salad dressing recipe.)

I have found recipes for salad dressings in many of my LC cookbooks. Here are the results from some I have made:

RANCH DRESSING (500 Low-Carb Recipes) 

I used avocado mayonnaise for this one, and buttermilk powder and water for the buttermilk. It came out very thin and watery. Next time, I will add a Tablespoon of sour cream and use less water. This recipe gives a 1 Tablespoon serving but does not say so.

FRENCH VINAIGRETTE DRESSING (500 Low-Carb Recipes)

I made this recipe not to put on my salads, but to use as a marinade, as in the recipe ‘Steak Vinaigrette’ in the same recipe book. The steak was great, and for my next trick, I drizzled some of this dressing on one of my daily sprout-based salads. I liked it! 

ITALIAN VINAIGRETTE DRESSING (500 Low-Carb Recipes)

Similar to the recipe above but with different seasonings, including crushed garlic and one drop of Tabasco sauce. I liked this one as well.

SMOKY PAPRIKA DRESSING (200 Low-Carb High-Fat Recipes)

I made this one with avocado mayonnaise (and now I need more avocado mayonnaise) and used regular paprika as I don’t have smoky paprika in the house at the moment. Good enough I’m making it again.

ANOTHER POPPY SEED DRESSING (200 Low-Carb High-Fat Recipes)

I made this one today— another winner! I used 8 drops of no-flavor Sweetleaf Sweet Drops instead of the amount of ‘liquid stevia’ mentioned. It was plenty sweet enough for me. You could use Sweetleaf in different flavors to vary the taste. 

HOW TO GET STARTED USING SALAD DRESSINGS

One thing to remember— a home-made salad dressing won’t last in your fridge forever! Maria Emmerich, in her cookbooks, tends to give such recipes a time limit of 5 days to 2 weeks in the fridge, depending on the recipe. So it is important to LABEL and DATE the canning jars you store (& make?) your salad dressings in. Also, if you don’t use that much (I tend to use one to one & 1/2 teaspoons per salad, even though most allow a one Tablespoon serving or more.) make a 1/2 to 1/4 batch.

To obey the use-it-up rule, you may need to add the dressing to each of your two daily salads, every day while the dressing lasts. If you actually prefer plain salads, or salads with just sea salt and Spike or Mrs. Dash, have that for a day or two after you finish a batch of dressing, before making more dressing.

I used to eat my sprout salads plain, right out of the Victorio sprouting tray, but having made a few dressings now and tried them, I’m getting used to non-naked salad. 

WHY SALAD DRESSINGS?

We use salad dressings because good fat is good for our health and helps us get into ketosis, and salad dressings are a way to get that good fat into our bodies— similar to the reason for making ‘bulletproof’ coffee and other hot beverages with butter or MCT oil in them. I can’t stand EVOO in my bulletproof coffee, but I love my salad dressings made with EVOO.

Salad dressings also add flavor to your salads, which may help you find them more edible if, like me, you’ve never been big on eating salads.

Also, just because they are called salad dressings doesn’t mean you can’t dip a bit of meat, celery sticks, or other food into it. 

BOOKS MENTIONED

(These are NOT affiliate links, because the kind folks at Amazon kicked me out of the affiliate program for not peddling enough books.)

500 Low-Carb Recipes - Dana Carpender -2002

200 Low-Carb High-Fat Recipes - Dana Carpender - 2015 

Real Food Keto - Jimmy Moore & Christina Moore, NTP - 2019