Recently my best friend Melissa asked me what my favorite homemade salad dressings were as she wanted to experiment with making homemade dressings at home versus purchasing them. Funny thing is, I grew up with only homemade dressings, Italian dressings (although we never measured the ingredients, we only eye balled our salad dressings directly on the salad). Because of the modern day convenience I began to purchase all my salad dressings instead of making them, what a mistake. Thanks to Melissa (what are best friends for after all) I began to experiment and tried this homemade creamy tarragon dressing…YUM!
In preparing for Thanksgiving dinner, I wanted to play around with new recipes and found this recipe for creamy tarragon salad dressing in a long pile of “must trys”, boy was I glad I did. I used fresh tarragon as it’s easy to find in the herb section of the markets here in California, if you can not find fresh tarragon, used dried.
The one thing different in this recipe is that I “coddled” the egg, all that means is that I barely cooked the egg so that the yolk was a little thicker for the recipe. Do not skip that step as you want that slightly thicker yolk, other recipes use the coddled egg method, especially salad dressings like Caesars and I remember we used to use egg in a lot of our dressings to help keep them thick.
Here is how I coddled the egg:
I told a large egg
put it in boiling water
removed it from the heat and covered it for 1 minute, then it was ready to be used for the salad dressing
Here is how I made the salad dressing:
I put my tarragon and garlic in a food processor and pulsed it until it was finely chopped
I then added the coddled egg yolk, onion, vinegar and salt
turned the food processor on and added the oil and half/half, at the end I added some green onions and some lemon juice. I then put it in a salad dressing bottle
here is the only photo I grabbed with the salad dressing on a simple salad
Because the tarragon has a strong flavor, I would recommend keeping the salad simple. I did butter lettuce, cherry tomatoes, avocado and candied pecans. We all loved this recipe for creamy tarragon salad dressing and I would highly recommend making it for the thanksgiving dinner or any dinner. If you love tarragon as much as I do, try my chicken with tarragon recipe, it too is a great one for your recipe file!
I used a food processor for this recipe, if you do not have one then I would finely chop the ingredients and add them to a bowl and use a whisk.
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Thank you again ~ Patty Limatola-Tanenbaum
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Ingredients
- 1 large Egg Yolk, Coddled
- 3 tablespoons Tarragon, fresh (or 1 tablespoon dried)
- 3 cloves Garlic, sliced
- 1 tablespoon White Vinegar
- 1 teaspoon Onion Powder
- 3/4 teaspoon Salt
- 1 cup Olive Oil
- 1/3 cup Half and Half
- 3 tablespoons Green Onions, chopped
- 1 tablespoon Lemon Juice
Directions
- In a 2 quart pan boil some water, add room temperature egg, cover and remove from heat. Let egg sit in boiled water for 1 minute, remove and use.
- In a food processor add the tarragon and garlic, pulsate until finely chopped.
- Add coddled egg, vinegar, onion powder and salt, pulsate again until mixed.
- With the food processor on, slowly add olive oil, then the half and half. Once mixture is completely mixed add the green onions and pulsate one or two times. Add lemon juice, put dressing in a jar and refrigerate for at least an hour prior to using. Enjoy!