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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

> commercial salad dressing almost always has sugar in it. Look at the nutritional facts label next time you're shopping for it. There's a few brands that offer "simple vinegar and oil" style dressings that don't have any sugar in them, but MOST salad dressings Americans come in contact with are full of sugar.

Making salad dressing is really easy btw in case anyone wants to try. Often all you need is olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper and you're set for most salads. Even a restaurant should be able to whip that up.

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If you have an immersion blender, making mayonnaise without sugar in it is very easy:

https://www.seriouseats.com/two-minute-mayonnaise

(And it tastes way better than commercial mayo!)

I love this author's recipes; it's the opposite of the normal recipe-preamble-slop. All of the stuff before the actual recipe is relevant information. In more complex recipes, he goes over the testing and process that led to the finished recipe. It's a wonderful view into the world of recipe creation.

Awesome, I'll give that a try. What I like about it is that you can use whatever high quality eggs you normally use instead of the cage eggs that mass producers will use. Until now I had to resort to vegan mayo.

"If you have an immersion blender"

You can also make mayonnaise with a whisk.

Yes, you can make mayonnaise with a whisk.

It's so much easier to do it with a hand blender though. It takes longer to clean up afterwards than it takes to make. And no maintaining a steady thin stream of oil, you just put it all into a container and blitz it.

You can make meringues and cakes with a whisk, too, but most people I know have electric mixers for that.

Mechanical eggbeaters with little flywheels were popular before the electric ones, too!

> Often all you need is olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper and you're set for most salads.

Why do you need a "dressing"? In my corner of Europe they put the above by default on every restaurant table and the salad has nothing in it (or maybe a tiny bit of oil and vinegar), you adjust it to taste.

The only places that offer salad "dressings" are american inspired and even those mostly serve it separately so you can ignore it.

For the same reason you add some spices before cooking, and salt multiple times throughout a recipe.

Plus, it's a little hard to emulsify or even suspend the oil and vinegar right there at the table.

> or maybe a tiny bit of oil and vinegar

That's what I mean by "dressing". We're talking about the same thing.

Ah well, above us they seem to call mayonnaise and other fat and high calorie stuff "dressing"?

Mayonnaise alone is used to dress salads, and mayonnaise is used as the base for many more elaborate salad dressings. The famous American "ranch" dressing is basically mayonnaise with buttermilk and allium and herbs added.

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