Summer means salads, salads can mean fatty dressings

I spell summer: s-a-l-a-d-s.

With farmers markets produce ripening right along and backyard gardens beginning to show real promise, light salads make perfect summer “keepin'-it-trim” meals.

From a weight maintenance perspective, salad greens are a great food choice. It's the dressing, or more specifically the oil in one form or another in the foundation on which the dressing is built, that can create big problems. Because a fat gram supplies 9 calories, it doesn't take much fat to tip a dressing's scales in the wrong direction. What can you do?

There are a few dressing alternatives; some good, some not-so-good and some that are downright awful. Let's begin with the awful: fat-free, calorie-free, store-bought salad dressings just don't cut it. Through some form of alchemy, these dressings look like regular salad dressings but deliver no calories, no fat and, well, not much flavor. And the flavor that is there I find harsh and off-putting.

Next up: store-bought fat-free or reduced-fat salad dressings. I like a Good Seasons fat-free Ranch dressing, as well as Kraft's Free line of dressings. Kraft's Light Done Right! line of dressings, too, can be downright tasty, but as “free” morphs into “light,” fat and calories rise, sometimes dramatically, so be careful here.

Finally, homemade, reduced-fat, reduced-calorie salad dressings hold the very real potential to be the best solution to the dressing dilemma.

My very best, time-tested method for reducing oil (fat) and ultimately calories in an oil-based dressing: slightly thickened chicken or vegetable broth. I've tried this noteworthy method in numerous from-scratch salad dressings, and it's worked wonderfully every single time.

The only other hassle-factor besides preparing slightly thickened broth when making a reduced-fat homemade salad dressing is getting the remaining ingredients together.

To reduce that factor significantly, I thought my thickened broth might work well with dried salad dressing mixes like Good Seasons' brand.

To test my theory, I bought a Good Seasons cruet and dressing mix combo pack. I cooked up some slightly thickened broth, used 1 tablespoon good-quality extra-virgin olive oil (instead of a half cup), went with everything else Good Seasons listed and — taa-daa — homemade, fat-reduced, calorie-reduced salad dressing that looked and acted just like regular dressing and tasted as if it had much more fat.

This easy-to-make dressing also clings to greens unlike water- or juice-based dressings that just puddle at the bottom of the salad bowl.

The savings?

Calories per 2 tablespoons dropped from 130 to 24 and fat grams plummeted from 13.5 to 1.7.

Here's how you can become a salad dressing wizard in your kitchen, too. For a pint or less of dressing, reduce the added oil to 1 or no more than 2 tablespoons and replace the remaining oil with an equal amount of slightly thickened broth. For example, if your recipe uses ½ cup olive oil, use 1 tablespoon olive oil and 7 tablespoons slightly thickened broth (8 tablespoons equal ½ cup). This works for salad dressing mixes that require added oil, or any oil-based salad dressing recipe.

Minor hassle-factors; major results.

In his cookbook “The Best Recipes in the World,” Mark Bittman writes that he didn't know how good a vinaigrette could be until he tasted vinaigrette while traveling in France. The secret: shallots (like a garlic-flavored onion, only much smaller). That's why my dressing tastes so good.

• Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and recipe makeover requests. Write him at don@theleanwizard.com.