Marinate Your Salad Protein In Dressing For A Simple Seasoning Hack

Salads encompass endless combinations of raw and cooked ingredients with an assortment of different textures and flavors all united by a coating of salad dressing. Coincidentally, salad dressing and marinades have similar components. So, the next time you make a main course salad, the dressing can double as the marinade for your proteins.

Whether you're making dressing from scratch or using your favorite store-bought brand, odds are it contains an acidic ingredient, a fat, and flavorful seasonings like mustard, honey, aromatics, herbs, and spices. You can simply reserve a portion of the salad dressing to pour over the meat or plant-based protein you'll use to top your salad. The salad dressing will season the meat with the same ingredients that tie the salad together, making for a more cohesive dish.

It is vital that you separate your marinade from the salad dressing itself so that there's no cross contamination from the raw meat to the rest of the salad. If you're using store bought dressing, buy a bottle for the marinade and another bottle for your salad. For homemade dressing, double the dressing recipe, pouring at least half of it into a fridge-safe container. Add a cup or two to a plastic bag with your protein of choice to sit for between four and 12 hours, then you can discard the plastic bag with any residual marinade when you throw the meat on the grill or into the oven.

Perhaps the most popular salad dressing marinade and one of the most popular store-bought varieties is Italian salad dressing. Italian dressing marinated chicken or steak would work well over an Italian chopped salad. Greek salad dressing is even simpler, consisting of lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, oregano, salt, and pepper. Since citrus and seafood are a match made in heaven, you could marinate shrimp or salmon in Greek dressing to bring your Greek salad into main course territory.

You can use the roasted pear vinaigrette in this salmon and squash salad recipe as the marinade for salmon and the roasting oil for the squash as well as the salad dressing. Top this recipe for roasted curry carrots and mint vinaigrette with mint vinaigrette-marinated lamb over a bed of microgreens. The ginger and lime vinaigrette featured in this Mongolian beef salad would make a great marinade. A miso ginger and lime dressing would be a delicious marinade for tofu served in a salad with napa cabbage, julienned carrots, radish, avocado, snow peas, and cucumbers.

This tangy buttermilk ranch dressing would give chicken a tangy, dairy-rich upgrade. You could serve it over a wedge salad with red onions, chopped hard-boiled eggs, bacon, and cherry tomatoes. The umami-richness of a store-bought caesar salad dressing would be an especially delicious grilled chicken marinade to encrust with extra parmesan cheese.