How To Make Thousand Island Dressing

Every now and then when I stop to think about it I wonder why ketchup is so much more popular than thousand island dressing. As far as I’m concerned thousand island is much more flavorful, and works on just about everything ketchup works on.

Any fast food place that brags about their “secret sauce” is really talking about thousand island. (Oops, now it’s not a secret any more.) One of my favorite uses — and the one that gets the strangest looks — is to use it instead of duck sauce with egg rolls. Mmmmmmm.

If you look carefully and shop around you may be able to find a brand that isn’t mostly canola oil and corn syrup. But if you can’t find a good one, this recipe is just what you need. It’s way better than any bottled brand I’ve had, and only takes a couple of minutes to make a batch.

Ingredients

2 cups mayonnaise

Mayonnaise

2 extra large eggs
1½ cups olive pomace oil
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon mustard powder

2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 cloves garlic
¼ cup diced onion
¼ cup diced pickle (sweet, dill, or combination)
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
1 extra large egg, hard boiled (optional)

Directions

Dice the onion.

Dice the pickle. If you have small ones, cut them in quarters …

… and chop several at once.

For larger pickles, you may want to cut out the seeds before dicing the rest.

Set the onion and pickle aside. This is for your mise en place.

Mince the garlic.

If you’re making the mayonnaise from scratch, put the eggs, white vinegar, mustard powder and oil in your mixing cup in that order. Put the stick blender all the way to the bottom, turn it on and slowly pull it up to the top. Don’t worry if it’s not thick enough for a sandwich, this is going to be in dressing.

Rather than get the food processor dirty, add the onion, pickle, garlic, tomato paste and balsamic vinegar to the cup the mayo was in.

Process it with the stick blender — it doesn’t have to be very smooth — then add it to the mayo and stir.

Check the taste and add black pepper if needed.

And that’s it. You could eat this by itself, it’s so good.

One extra touch is to add a diced hard-boiled egg.

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Regular readers might notice I did lettuce yesterday and salad dressing today. You might think that means I’ll be doing some kind of salad in the next day or two. That’s very observant of you. But I’ll be you don’t expect taco salad.

Okay, now you expect taco salad. This is another one of those “delicious but not pretty enough for company” recipes. Why do we do that? Have favorite recipes that we won’t serve to guests? I’ve never understood that. If you have any recipes that you like, but you won’t serve to guests — or your wife won’t let you serve it to them — post it in the comments. I’m thinking about doing a collection of “Too Good for Company” recipes.