Normally I've relied on bottled salad dressings though my experience with store-bought dressings has been decidedly mixed. Vinaigrettes and Italian dressings tend to be safer buys, although many of them contain thickeners and stabilizers such as xanthan gum that impart a somewhat unpleasant tacky or mucilaginous quality to the dressing. Creamy dressings, especially ranch dressing, are far less trustworthy for multiple reasons. I love the idea of a creamy dressing far more than I like the usual execution. Almost every ranch dressing I've ever tasted, for instance, has had a nasty aftertaste. Also--and I admit this is perhaps a purely personal preference--a creamy dressing should still be somewhat fluid. It should flow over the lettuce, not glop onto it in big, quivering blobs. (I'm sure there's a bit of design to making dressings so thick and mayonnaise-like: it's harder to pour on just a little bit of them.) Furthermore, creamy dressings are I've noticed far more likely to be loaded with sugar. Especially prone to oversweetening is a dressing that I genuinely like when it's done well: Thousand Island.
It's easy to fake up a sort of Thousand Island dressing with off-the-shelf mayonnaise, ketchup, and pickle relish, but...really, you can do better than that. Here's my recipe. As usual I must acknowledge that it's largely based off recipes from another source: Alton Brown's "Good Eats" recipe for mayonnaise, used with little modification, and a Food Network Thousand Island recipe, from which I departed more freely.
Ingredients
1 large egg
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon mustard powder
a pinch of white sugar
2 teaspoons lemon juice (as usual I just use the bottled stuff)
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 cup canola oil
1 clove garlic
¼ cup sriracha sauce
3 tablespoons ketchup
¼ cup finely chopped pickled cucumbers and daikon (these were homemade)
2 tablespoons of the pickling brine
black pepper
Directions
Crack the egg and separate the yolk from the white. (I use the method of carefully transferring the yolk between the two halves of the broken shell, letting the white spill out over the edges. You can catch the unused white and freeze it for later use but in this case I confess I flushed it.) Transfer the yolk to a small bowl and add the salt, the mustard powder, a small pinch of sugar (probably you can omit this altogether), 1 tsp of lemon juice and 1½ tsp of vinegar. With a small wire whisk mix the ingredient thoroughly until a smooth paste is obtained.
Place the cup of oil in a container that allows for easy dispensing of small amounts; a measuring cup with a spout is a good choice. (Alton Brown uses a squeeze bottle and that probably is better.) Start whisking the mixture in the bowl vigorously and start dribbling the oil into it in a very thin stream at first, with a careful eye to make sure that a large amount of unmixed oil never persists before being whisked in. After maybe a quarter of the oil is added it's safer to pour a bit faster but when the oil is half gone stop. Add the remaining 1 tsp of lemon juice and 1½ tsp of vinegar, whisk these in well, then resume whisking in the oil until it's all added. You should have now a bowl of mayonnaise, light yellow in color, smooth and homogeneous, somewhat more fluid than commercial mayonnaise perhaps but still thick and rich.
Smash the clove of garlic against a cutting board with the flat side of a chef's knife and then mince the pulp as finely as possible before scooping it into the bowl. Add the rest of the ingredients: the diced pickles, the hot sauce, the ketchup, and a few grinds of black pepper. Whisk these in thoroughly. At this point you can consider the dressing done if you like a thicker salad dressing but, if you wish to have a more fluid dressing, whisk in the pickling brine a little at a time until you achieve the desired consistency.
The resulting dressing is so much more flavorful than anything you'll get from a bottle; the hot sauce gives it a sharp tang that brings out the other flavors. Probably the ketchup can be replaced with the same quantity of plain tomato sauce for an even lower-carb dressing (but I used what I had immediately to hand.) Obviously commercial pickles or dill relish may be conveniently substituted for the chopped homemade pickles.
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