The Store-Bought Caesar Salad Dressing You Should Leave Off Your Shopping List
Store-bought Caesar salad dressings are ideal when you don't want to make your own, but that only checks out if you pick the right brand. With numerous options now perched on grocery shelves, you may be lucky to land the perfect one and even more so to avoid a terrible pick. We sampled store-bought Caesar salad dressings, and one in particular isn't worth the ink on your shopping list: Wish-Bone's creamy Caesar salad dressing.
Wish-Bone's Caesar dressing won't make you want to spit it out immediately, but neither will it make you want to savor it for long. It's a middle-of-the-road, uninspiring dressing that tastes cheap — the opposite of what you want in a Caesar salad dressing. Although it's simple, Caesar salad dressing carries a distinct flavor. It's a blend of intense aromas that animate otherwise plain greens. But Wish-Bone Caesar dressing's monotone, mayo-deficient essence won't do much for your lettuce except smudge it with lackluster taste.
Even then, you'll be lucky to get this dressing spread evenly across your salad. Its globby texture makes it stubborn when coating your leafy greens, abandoning the sense of what a typical Caesar dressing ought to do. But, say you manage to get a few smears here and there on your romaine leaves, don't get too excited about this hard-won victory. Once you've eaten it, Wish-Bone Caesar salad dressing leaves a chemical-ish, unpleasant aftertaste on your palate as a reward.
How to improve Wish-Bone Caesar salad dressing
While Wish-Bones's Caesar salad dressing ranks last on our list, the fact that it's affordable and contains no corn syrup at all, plain or high fructose, is a plus point for some. Corn syrup often gets lumped together with high fructose corn syrup associated with health risks, so the lack of either in the ingredients list works to Wish-Bone's advantage. If you noticed this and wind up with a bottle of Wish-Bone's Caesar salad dressing, you may appreciate it even more with some tweaking.
To remedy its overly thick texture, you can apply this underrated trick Alex Guarnaschelli uses for better salad dressing: Add a splash of water. Water is a common yet underused ingredient to effectively thin a salad dressing so that it coats everything evenly. It even doubles to tone down overly dominant flavors in a salad dressing. So add some and cross your fingers in the hopes that water dampens the harsh aftertaste Wish-Bone's Caesar salad dressing carries.
To make up for the pale taste of Wish-Bone's Caesar dressing, introduce a bold ingredient just before serving the salad. Just like you would with a classic Caesar salad recipe, use a grater to shave some Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese atop the salad. This will be sure to make up for the lack of zest that our Tasting Table taste tester witnessed despite Wish-Bone's ingredients list, including Parmesan cheese.