Revamping vinegar, oil dressing recipe makes for a lighter dinner option

Even though the weather is cooling off, I still find a no-cook tossed dinner salad one very appealing meal option.

A colorful picture of a cucumber, grape tomato, chickpea, Kalamata olive, red onion and romaine salad in a recent food magazine caught my eye and had my mouth watering. I wanted to eat that salad immediately, however, that salad's oil and vinegar dressing and feta cheese worried this lean guy.

So I headed into the kitchen to see if there were some way to resolve the dressing and cheese issues. I went after the dressing first.

A standard oil and vinegar dressing gets 99-percent of its calories from fat for one simple reason: the other ingredients in the dressing are extremely low in calories. So a single tablespoon of that dressing delivers 60 almost-all-fat calories. Since one tablespoon barely seasons a small salad properly, cutting back on dressing generally isn't an appealing option.

When I first worked on a leaner Caesar salad dressing, I substituted chicken broth, slightly thickened, with cornstarch for 95 percent of the oil in the dress.

Sure it was lean, but I couldn't get the dressing to hang together for more than a minute.

If you've mixed up an oil and vinegar dressing, you know it looks great when first made, but in seconds the vinegar (94 percent water) separates from the oil. Why?

There's nothing to glue the oil and vinegar (water) together. Egg yolks make great water and oil glue thanks to the natural lecithin (an emulsifier), but there's potential health risk with raw egg. My Caesar dressing solution turned out to be nonfat mayonnaise.

Nonfat mayonnaise is already an emulsion, and I found that if I whisked a tablespoon or two of oil into some it strung the remaining water-based ingredients together beautifully.

I tested that method with a basic oil and vinegar dressing and it worked like a charm. Even when I added slightly thickened chicken broth the dressing stayed mixed and looked perfect.

My reduced-fat oil and vinegar dressing served up just 23 calories per tablespoon, about one-third of regular, but it still got 87 percent of its calories from fat. That's because vinegar contains 3 calories per tablespoon; reduced-fat chicken broth has a single calorie per tablespoon, but the oil still brought 116 calories per tablespoon.

With the dressing issue addressed, I moved on to the 300 calories that regular feta cheese's 4 ounces brought to this salad.

I quickly solved that dilemma by switching to light (lower fat) feta cheese. An ounce of regular feta cheese has 6 fat grams and 75 calories (77-percent from fat), where light feta (Trader Joe's brand) contains 40 calories (33.8 percent from fat) and 1.5 fat grams. This change trimmed 140 calories and 18 fat grams from the whole salad.

Finally, I re-created the salad with light feta and my new oil and vinegar dressing. It looked and tasted terrific and I didn't miss a single calorie or a gram of fat. Now that's a satisfying story ending.

If you want to make my salad and dressing, here's the recipe. Give it a try.

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

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