by Melanie Albert, Food and nutrition expert, author and speaker. Founder & CEO Experience Nutrition Group, LLC
For several years I’ve been guiding clients, from young golfers, to holistic practitioners, to former NFL players, to seniors to create a raw kale salad. The key is a simple-to-prepare salad dressing. In my next book to be released in April 2016, “A New View of Healthy Eating,” I share simple culinary techniques. Once you learn the techniques, you can intuitively create your own dishes.
How to make a basic salad dressing is one of those simple culinary techniques. I’m sharing the draft from the book around creating salad dressings and look forward your feedback when you experiment with your own salad dressings.
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Excerpt from “A New View of Healthy Eating”
EXPERIENCE NUTRITION SIGNATURE RAW MASSAGED KALE SALAD
Make your own gourmet raw kale salad with your favorite fruit, berries, nuts and seeds. Learn how to make a simple salad dressing, massage your kale, and add-in your favorite seasonal fruit and berries, and nuts and seeds.
“The key to a tender kale salad is a simple dressing and massaging the kale. And, the fun is in creating a beautiful, tasty kale salad is the seasonal fruit and berries. One of my very favorite add-ins in a kale salad is local Arizona organic pomegranate seeds.” Melanie Albert
Basic Salad Dressing: 3 Ingredients. That’s It
Three key ingredients for a salad dressing include a fat, acid and salt. Optional add-ins include aromatics (such as garlic and onions), fresh herbs and sweeteners like raw local honey and fresh dates. To make your initial dressing for a kale salad, start with fresh lemon, organic extra virgin olive oil, sea salt and garlic. Once you have learned how to prepare a dressing with this technique, you can use this method to create your own unique salad dressings for a raw kale salad or other fresh salads.
Simple Ingredients
- 1 fresh lemon, squeezed, approximately ¼ cup
- Organic extra virgin olive oil, twice as much as the lemon juice, approximately ½ cup
- ¼ tsp sea salt
- 2-3 garlic cloves, minced
Simple Steps
- Squeeze a fresh organic lemon into a pint-size Mason jar
- Pour in twice as much olive oil as the lemon
- Sprinkle in sea salt and minced garlic
- Shake the jar
- Taste and notice if your dressing seems too oily, acidy or too little or too much salt. This is a great place to mindfully use your cooking intuition. Add-in ingredients until the dressing tastes great to you.
A New View of Healthy Eating: Basic Salad Dressing
Create Your Own Salad Dressing
Learn the simple salad dressing technique and then create your own with different fats, different acids, and add-ins, such as sweeteners or freshly minced herbs or sweeteners. Sweeteners such as honey, can be used to balance a dressing that seems too acid tasting.
- Fats: Olive oil, grape seed oil, nut oils, such as walnut oil
- Acid: Citrus (Lemon, limes, oranges); Vinegars (Balsamic, rice red or white wine), stone-ground mustard
- Salt: Your choice of sea salt or Himalayan salt
- Optional Sweeteners: Raw honey or dates
- Optional Aromatics: Garlic, green onions, shallots, red onions
- Optional Freshly Minced Herbs: Basil, cilantro, oregano, parsley
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