Salad Dressings

Appears in
Professional Cooking: 10th Edition
Professional Cooking

By Wayne Gisslen

Published 2025

  • About
Salad dressings are liquids or semiliquids used to flavor salads. They are sometimes considered cold sauces, and they serve the same functions as sauces—that is, they flavor, moisten, and enrich.
Most of the basic salad dressings used today can be divided into three categories:
  1. Oil and vinegar dressings (most unthickened dressings).
  2. Mayonnaise-based dressings (most thickened dressings).
  3. Cooked dressings (similar in appearance to mayonnaise dressings, but more tart and with little or no oil content).