I probably whip up a salad every day, if not every other day, whether it be to have on its own or to go alongside my evening meal with things like air-fried salmon or my fail-safe chicken recipe. Not only is it filling, but it’s the best way to pack in vegetables, especially if it gets to the evening and you’re lacking your five a day. If you ask me what the key to a great-tasting salad is, without hesitation, I’d say it’s the dressing every time.

I’ve bought so many supermarket and branded salad dressings over the years that I’ve just given up on trying to find one I like. Instead, I just prefer to make my own now with just a few very simple ingredients. I switch between two three-ingredient salad dressings—one that’s a failsafe option and the other that I’ve recently been loving.

For my salad dressings, I typically use three ingredients that work well with the usual ingredients I put in my salads: extra virgin olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and sea salt.

The rich, bold flavour of high-quality olive oil works really well in this salad dressing, and the apple cider vinegar adds a delicious, tangy flavour to the savoury dish.

Fancying a switch-up, I came across a sweetened mayonnaise salad dressing from Simply Recipes that looked tasty and decided to recreate it.

The creamy dressing uses only three ingredients: rice vinegar, sugar, and mayonnaise. The recipe says to add sesame seed oil and poppy seeds as extra ingredients, but I didn’t have them to hand, and it tasted delicious without them.

This time, I decided to opt for lettuce, carrots, cabbage, and onions in the salad, and the dressing paired beautifully with them.

This dressing is fantastic as you can make it in five minutes a day or two in advance, and it doesn’t harden or separate in the fridge.

One thing that I would just stress with this recipe is that you should stick with full-fat mayonnaise, as I did use light mayo first, and it did start to curdle.

While the recipe does call for two tablespoons of sugar, I opted for two teaspoons as I didn’t want the dressing to be overly sweet.

Ingredients (serves four)

For the dressing

  • A quarter cup of rice vinegar
  • A quarter cup of full-fat mayonnaise
  • Two teaspoons of sugar

For the salad

  • One carrot
  • Iceberg lettuce
  • One onion
  • One quarter of a red cabbage