Italian dressing is a vinaigrette that has been taught badly. The bottled version is thickened and sweetened until it stops behaving like oil and vinegar at all, and the packet version is dried herbs and a great deal of salt. What it should be is a sharp, herb-heavy vinaigrette that separates in the jar and needs shaking, with just enough grated Parmesan to give it body and cling.

There is no cooking and barely any technique. You put everything in a jar and shake it, which is not a shortcut but the actual method: shaking makes a temporary emulsion that is perfectly stable long enough to dress a salad. Ten minutes, and it sits in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks.

Equipment

The jar is not just storage here, it is the mixing vessel and the reason this works, because a sealed jar shaken hard breaks the oil into droplets far faster than whisking does and you lose nothing to the sides of a bowl. The Le Parfait Super Jars with Wire-Bail Clamp Lid clamp shut properly, which matters when you are shaking a jar of oil and vinegar with force, and this dressing separates by design so you will be re-shaking it every time. Dried herbs give up far more flavor if you crush them first, and raw garlic wants to be a paste rather than chopped pieces in a thin dressing, so both go through the Enameled Cast Iron Mortar & Pestle Set before anything else happens. Peeling and prepping the garlic and grating the cheese happen on the Two-Tone XL Cutting Board, which gives you room to keep them apart until they go in.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons Parmesan, finely grated
• 2 garlic cloves, peeled
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1 teaspoon honey
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 teaspoon dried basil
• 1/2 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, freshly ground
• Kosher salt, to taste

Ingredient Selection

Dried herbs, not fresh, and this is the one dressing on this site where I will say that. Fresh basil bruises and blackens in an acidic dressing within a day, and fresh oregano is much milder than its dried form. Dried herbs also rehydrate in the vinegar and oil as the dressing sits, which is why this genuinely improves overnight rather than just keeping.

The vinegar-to-oil ratio here is 1 to 2, which is sharper than the classic 1 to 3. That is deliberate for a herb dressing that has to stand up to sturdy leaves and cured meat, but if it reads too sharp for you, add oil a tablespoon at a time rather than cutting the vinegar, which would flatten it.

Grate the Parmesan yourself and grate it fine. Pre-grated cheese carries an anti-caking starch that will not dissolve, and in a thin dressing it settles to the bottom as grit rather than suspending. Two tablespoons is not enough to make this a cheese dressing; it is there for body and a savory undertone.

The honey is a single teaspoon and it is doing balance, not sweetness. Vinegar this assertive needs something to round its edge, and without it the dressing tastes thin and aggressive. Sugar works identically if you prefer.

Method

Mise en Place

1. Crush the garlic and bruise the dried herbs: Work the garlic cloves in the mortar with a pinch of coarse salt until they are a smooth paste, then add the oregano and basil and crush them briefly against the sides. Crushing dried herbs breaks open the oil cells, which is where their flavor is sitting.
2. Grate the Parmesan fine: Use the smallest holes you have, so it suspends in the dressing rather than settling out.

Build in the Jar

1. Put the vinegar, lemon juice, mustard and honey in first: Add them to the jar along with the garlic and herb paste, the onion powder, red pepper flakes and black pepper. Getting the honey and mustard into the acid before the oil arrives is what lets them dissolve; dropped into oil they stay in a lump at the bottom.
2. Add the oil and the cheese, then seal: Pour in the olive oil, add the grated Parmesan, and clamp the lid down properly.

Shake and Rest

1. Shake hard for 30 seconds: Shake until the dressing turns cloudy and uniform and you can no longer see a separate layer of oil. Half-hearted shaking is the reason a homemade vinaigrette tastes like oil on one leaf and vinegar on the next.
2. Rest at least 30 minutes, then taste for salt: The dried herbs need that time to rehydrate and the garlic needs it to lose its raw edge, and the dressing tastes harsh and disjointed before they do. Taste at the end and salt only then, since the Parmesan and mustard have already brought some.

Serving and Application

Shake it again right before it goes on the salad, every time, because it will have separated in the refrigerator and that is not a fault. It suits sturdy things: romaine, chopped salads, anything with salami, olives, provolone or chickpeas in it. It is also a genuinely good marinade for chicken or pork before grilling, and a dressing for cold pasta salad, where the herbs have time to work into the noodles.

Popular Variations

• Creamy Italian: Whisk 1/4 cup of mayonnaise into the finished dressing. This is the version most American restaurants serve and it stops separating, since the mayonnaise stabilizes the emulsion.
• Zesty, packet style: Double the oregano and the red pepper flakes and add 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder alongside the fresh garlic. Closer to what people remember from the dry mix.
• Lemon Italian: Replace the red wine vinegar with an equal amount of lemon juice for a brighter, less sharp dressing that suits fish and delicate leaves.
• Herb-heavy: Add a teaspoon of dried parsley and a half teaspoon of dried thyme. A legitimate direction, though past that point you are making a herb dressing rather than an Italian one.

Make Ahead, Storage and Reheating

This is the best keeper of any dressing on the site, because there is no dairy emulsion, no egg and no mayonnaise in it. The Parmesan is the only perishable ingredient and there is very little of it. Store it in the sealed jar in the refrigerator at 40F or below and use it within about two weeks, shaking before each use.

It is not heated and it does not freeze usefully, though there is little reason to try. The olive oil will cloud and may partly solidify in the cold, which is normal and not a sign anything is wrong; let the jar sit out for ten minutes and shake it.

One thing to be careful about, because this recipe contains raw garlic in oil. That combination is a botulism-risk category rather than a shelf-life question, and Oregon State University Extension is explicit that homemade mixtures of garlic or herbs in oil must be refrigerated rather than left at room temperature. The vinegar here provides real acidity, which this dressing has and a plain garlic oil does not, but keep it cold regardless and do not leave the jar on the counter between meals.

History

The honest position is that what Americans call Italian dressing is an American product, and Italians do not dress salads this way. In Italy a salad is usually dressed at the table with oil, vinegar or lemon, and salt, added separately and by eye rather than premixed into a bottled formula with dried herbs and sugar in it.

The bottled and packet versions are mid-twentieth-century American convenience products, and the dried seasoning mix in particular is what fixed the flavor most people now recognize as Italian dressing. Calling it a regional Italian recipe would be inaccurate. Calling it an Italian-American one is fair: it comes from the same immigrant kitchens that produced a lot of good food nobody in Italy would recognize either.

What is genuinely Italian is the underlying ratio, oil and acid with seasoning, which is the base of dressings across the Mediterranean and considerably older than any bottle.

Nutrition

An estimate, calculated ingredient by ingredient from USDA FoodData Central entries by hand rather than measured in a lab. The recipe makes about 1 cup, and the figures are given per 2 tablespoons rather than as a share of the batch.

References

• Oregon State University Extension Service: Herbs and Vegetables in Oil (SP 50-701), on why garlic and herbs in oil must be refrigerated
• FoodSafety.gov: Cold Food Storage Chart, on refrigerating at 40F or below

Related Guides

The closest relative here is Chimichurri, the site's other oil-and-vinegar herb dressing, which carries the same raw-garlic-in-oil caution and shows what the same structure does with fresh herbs instead of dried. If you want to understand why this one separates and the creamy dressings do not, Ranch Dressing is the comparison, built on a permanent emulsion rather than a temporary one.

Thank You

Thanks for shaking a jar instead of buying a bottle. If you land on a vinegar-to-oil ratio you like better than mine, I want to hear it, because that ratio is the entire argument with a vinaigrette and mine is sharper than most. Drop me a note through the contact page. More dressings are on the way, so say which one you want next.

Chef Alan
Wine Drop Cookery
35 years, Six Four Diamond Awards