Skip The Grocery Store Trip And Make Ina Garten's Lemon Vinaigrette

For some people, a salad is only as good as the dressing you toss it in. Whether it's sweet, tart, herby, or acidic, a good vinaigrette will compliment the other ingredients well and really bring the whole medley together. It's a crucial part of any salad — that final touch that keeps you coming back for more leafy, flavorful bites.

But salad dressing is one of those things that are well worth making yourself at home, rather than buying at the store. Why? While it may require a little more work and it doesn't last as long, Odom Health & Wellness explains that the pros outweigh the cons. With a store-bought dressing, you have no control over the ingredients, preservatives, and dyes in the bottle. It's often more expensive, can contain unnecessary sugars, and offers fewer nutrients — while a homemade vinaigrette will generally be healthier for you and taste better.

So if you're someone who grabs a bottle of salad dressing at the store for the sake of ease and convenience, we've got a vinaigrette recipe for you that Ina Garten says "couldn't be easier." 

When Garten says easy, she means easy. The celebrity chef's favorite lemon vinaigrette only requires four ingredients, and to make this even more of a no-brainer, they're all pantry staples that you're likely to have laying around in your kitchen. The only ingredients you need to make this vinaigrette are olive oil, lemon, salt, and pepper.

To make the salad dressing, just whisk together some "good" olive oil, freshly squeezed lemon juice, salt, and pepper until combined. It's officially one of the easiest vinaigrettes ever, and that subtle, balanced lemon-olive-oil combo will taste delicious on your favorite salad.

Garten has a couple of hacks to make this process even easier. "I actually make it in a measuring cup, so I can measure and mix at the same time," she explains in her Instagram video of the recipe. That way you only dirty one dish, and get the whole recipe done in one go. Her other trick includes pouring the vinaigrette into the bottom of the salad bowl — before you add the lettuce and other ingredients — so that when you're ready to mix it all together, you have a freshly-dressed salad.

You'll notice that Garten's recipe specifically calls for freshly squeezed lemon juice, rather than bottled lemon juice you might buy at the grocery store (you know the one, that little lemon-shaped plastic bottle near the produce section). Just like there are more positives to making your own salad dressing, there's a reason you want to stick to fresh lemons.

As is the case with many bottled products, most bottled lemon juice contains preservatives, or sulfites, to keep it from rotting — but as a result, both its flavor and nutrient levels are dulled, according to Fresh Fit. Fresh lemons contain more vitamin C, folate, and potassium than bottled, and because their juice is freshly squeezed it tastes brighter and more acidic.

An added bonus of having some lemons lying around is that they can be used in so many different ways to level up your kitchen hacks and cooking game. So be sure to go for the real deal.