Learn how to make an easy oil-free strawberry vinaigrette dressing for salads. You’ll need a blender or an immersion blender, a handful of ingredients and 10 minutes of your time.
Why I love this strawberry vinaigrette:
- So easy and quick to make.
- Deliciously fresh on salads.
- Even combines well with other salad dressings giving a tangy boost to your dish.
- Keeps well in the fridge.
My strawberry vinaigrette is:
- Vegan and plant-based (of course)
- Gluten-free
- Suitable on a low glycemic plant-based diet.
- Candida diet friendly
- Oil-free
- Nut-free and peanut-free
- Soy-free
- Low sugar
- Grain-free
Table of contents
How to Make Strawberry Vinaigrette for Salads
The Ingredients
Obviously, the main ingredient is fresh strawberries. They are full of vitamin C as well as manganese. Moreover, they also contain a decent amount of folate and potassium. I suggest opting for organic strawberries whenever possible. Did you know that strawberries are the number one produce in EWG’s Dirty Dozen 2021?
On the other hand, when you substitute fresh strawberries with raspberries, blueberries, or even kiwis and you’ll get either raspberry, blueberry, or kiwi vinaigrette.
Secondly, a decent vinaigrette needs an acidic agent or two. In this recipe I’m using balsamic vinegar and lemon juice. However, you can substitute balsamic vinegar with regular vinegar or apple cider vinegar. In case you hate vinegars altogether, go for lemon juice alone.
It’s worth mentioning that some balsamic vinegars are mixed with a sweetener, date paste for example. In that case you might as well ditch the sweetener in this recipe. I believe the vinegar itself would provide enough sweet taste.
Next, we will spice it up a bit with fresh garlic and ginger. I absolutely love the combination of before mentioned spices! They will add the so-needed tanginess and pungent flavour.
I also decided to add some fat to my strawberry vinaigrette, avocado to be more precise. It adds some creaminess and helps better absorb all the fat-soluble vitamins in your salad. Other good options would be tahini, almond butter, and cashew butter.
Lastly, we will add some sweetness. I went for erythritol, but you can also choose other sweeteners like maple syrup, xylitol, date sugar/paste or a whole date for that matter, coconut sugar, and even honey or agave syrup.
In order to prepare this recipe according to Plantricious guidelines, use date sugar instead of erythritol. What’s Plantricious anyway?
Plantricious is a new food category for prepared and packaged plant-based foods and recipes – Plantricious aka plant nutritious. The latter is based on nutrition guidelines created and endorsed by the most respected medical experts in US advocating plant nutrition for optimum health. Read more and get Plantricious recipes!
What’s the Difference Between Balsamic Vinegar and Regular Wine Vinegar?
Traditional balsamic vinegar is made only with one ingredient — “grape must” (in Italian, “mosto“). Grape must is freshly crushed fruit juice that contains the skins, seeds, and stems of the fruit.
To make balsamic vinegar, grape must is boiled to a concentrate, fermented and acidified, and aged for 12 to 25 years or longer in wood barrels.
Modern commercial balsamic vinegars (what you will likely find at your local grocery store) combine concentrated grape must with wine vinegar to speed up the acidification process. This vinegar is typically aged from 2 months to 3 years in large oak barrels. Go deeper and read this guide to balsamic vinegar.
Wine vinegar is white or red wine that has been allowed to sour. The word is from the French vin (wine) and aigre (sour). Read more on the history and manufacturing processes of vinegar.
The Process
The actual making of this strawberry vinaigrette is super easy.
You start by washing the strawberries and removing the leaves. On another note, if you have organic strawberries, feel free to leave the leaves be and include them in your dressing.
Next, you simply throw all the ingredients into a blender or a beaker and blend until smooth. Voilà!
How to Store Strawberry Vinaigrette
The simplest way to store this strawberry vinaigrette is to pour it into an airtight jar or a container and stick it in the fridge. It will keep for at least a week.
How to Use Strawberry Vinaigrette
There are several delicious ways you can make use of this strawberry vinaigrette:
- Use it as a salad dressing on green salads. That being said, the vinaigrette goes extremely well with all kinds of greens. Think of lettuce, spinach salad, or steamed leafy greens like kale, pak choi, chard, collard greens, turnip greens, beet greens.
- You can even spread it on a slice of sourdough bread or savoury sourdough pancakes. My favourite breads are whole spelt sourdough and either fermented buckwheat or buckwheat-quinoa bread.
- I also find that this strawberry vinaigrette combines quite well with other dressings in the same bowl. So, try adding a little bit of vinaigrette together with miso-tahini dressing or my chickpea-tahini dressing. I’m sure you will welcome that little extra tanginess in your salad bowl.
Go and make use of my 6-step guide to vegan oil-free salad dressings! Watch the below video and download a 3-page printable guide.
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How to Make Strawberry Vinaigrette for Salads
- Total Time: 10 minutes
- Yield: a bit over 300 ml
- Diet: Vegan
Description
Learn how to make an easy oil-free strawberry vinaigrette dressing for salads. You’ll need a blender or an immersion blender, a handful of ingredients and 10 minutes of your time.
Ingredients
- 250g (8.8oz) fresh strawberries
- 4 tsps. balsamic vinegar
- 4 tsps. lemon juice
- 1 garlic clove
- ¼ avocado
- 2g (0.07oz) slice of fresh ginger
- 1 tbsp. erythritol (or date sugar for Plantricious version), optional
- Black pepper to taste
Instructions
- Start by washing the strawberries and removing the leaves. In case your strawberries are organic, you can also leave the leaves on and include them into your vinaigrette.
- Next, throw all the ingredients into a blender or a beaker and blend until smooth.
- Store in an airtight jar or a container in the fridge for a week or longer.
Notes
See under the recipe card for substitution tips.
Nutritional info with date sugar: 36.7 kcal, 5.1g carbohydrates, 1.2g fats, 0.2g saturated fat, 0.6g protein, 1.4g fibre, 1.2mg sodium.
- Prep Time: 10 minutes
- Category: Raw
- Method: Blender
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 4 tablespoons
- Calories: 28 kcal
- Sodium: 1.2mg
- Fat: 1.1g
- Saturated Fat: 0.15g
- Carbohydrates: 3.1g
- Fiber: 1.4g
- Protein: 0.5g
Ingredient Substitution Tips
- Substitute fresh strawberries with raspberries, blueberries, or even kiwis and you’ll get either raspberry, blueberry, or kiwi vinaigrette.
- Feel free to use wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar instead of balsamic vinegar. However, as the latter has a natural sweetness to it, you’d definitely need to add some kind of sweetener.
- In case you are not into vinegars at all, substitute it with more lemon juice.
- Should your stomach not agree with fresh garlic, try garlic powder instead. However, you’d lose some of the tanginess.
- Tahini works very well instead of avocado. Add 2 teaspoons.
- It’s an option to leave out avocado altogether. In which case you’d get a truly low-fat salad dressing.
- As far as sweetener is concerned, feel free to use any preferred one. For example, xylitol, date sugar, coconut sugar, date syrup or paste, or blend in a whole medjool date for that matter.
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