It's Not Hard To Transform Your Favorite Creamy Dip Into A Salad Dressing

Imagine the scenario: You've labored over delicious, creamy homemade dips to serve with appetizers for a meal where you're expecting a large group of friends. These dips could be elaborate ones made with many ingredients, or only something creamy mixed with a sauce or marinade. Either way, they have most certainly taken a lot of hard work to put together. So, when a few of your guests cancel last-minute for unavoidable reasons, you're left with tons of dip that you don't have the heart to throw away.

Don't worry though, your hard work won't be wasted with this little trick. You can transform your creamy dip into a salad dressing by adding in some milk, water, lemon juice, or other liquid of similar consistency to thin out the concoction and make it ideal to dress your salads for days to come. This is an easy way to salvage your favorite creamy dip. Before you present it to guests, however, we recommend that you taste it both on its own and on a piece of your salad.

A salad dressing that has been repurposed from an existing dip must contain an emulsifying agent, which helps act as a bridge between liquids that are usually unmixable (oil and water) and makes sure your salad dressings come out even and smooth. Dips made from mayonnaise, mustard, or yogurt are therefore the easiest to convert into salad dressings, as they all act as emulsifying agents. 

You can add a variety of ingredients to these bases to achieve the flavor of your choice. Throw in some dill, onion powder, chives, and parsley to make ranch dressing; Worcestershire sauce, anchovies, garlic, Dijon mustard, and lemon juice to make a Caesar salad dressing; and blue cheese crumbles, lemon juice, and parsley for a blue cheese dressing. Another popular choice for this hack is green goddess dressing, which uses a lot of herbs, like mint, tarragon, parsley, chives, and spinach.

If your problem is utilizing the tiny leftover bits of store-bought dip from the package, there's an easy hack for that too. Just add yogurt or sour cream to the container that holds the leftover dip, as well as other ingredients to achieve the flavor profile you seek. These could include lemon juice, olive oil, honey, and salt, among others. Then, close the lid of the container and shake it until the ingredients adhere together and result in a delicious salad dressing with an easily-pourable consistency. This way, you'll be sure to get a hint of the flavor of your favorite dip in your salad dressing.

Vegetable dips are particularly easy to convert into yummy salad dressings. Add Greek yogurt (which adds to the vegetable's flavors) or crème fraîche to transform your dip to serve with grain salads, coleslaws, or creamy potato salads. They can also be thinned out to dress leafy salads by adding extra vinegar or lemon juice and a splash of olive oil.

Interestingly, this hack also works the other way round. While making a salad dressing at home, you may end up with a mixture that is thicker than you had initially hoped for. Instead of discarding it, see if you can use the mixture as a dip. You could perfect its taste by adding particular ingredients and leaving the thick and creamy texture as it is.