I was planning on making a taco salad for a dinner with friends, and the recipe called for using Catalina French as the dressing.
Now, I love me some Catalina dressing, and quite often, I have a bottle in the fridge; but, this was a BIG DEAL DINNER – the first gathering of a group of dear friends in over a year, celebrating vaccinations and retirement and drinking wine and stuff – so I chose to make my old favorite replacement.
Tasty, and a lot less sugar, too, so, bonus!
INGREDIENTS
•1/4 cup ketchup
•2 tbsp sugar
•1/4 cup onion, chopped
•1/2 teaspoon paprika
•1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
•1/4 tsp garlic powder
•1/4 tsp Seasoned Salt
•1/4 tsp black pepper
•1/4 tsp Aleppo pepper
•2 tbsp fig balsamic vinegar
•2 tbsp sherry vinegar
•1/2 cup canola oil
Note 1: I used a local (well, made in Poland, but imported by a Chicago group) spicy ketchup. Feel free to use your own fave.
Note 2: 1/4 cup of cider vinegar is more than fine if you don’t happen to have fig balsamic and sherry vinegars on hand.
Add the sugar, onion, paprika, garlic powder, Seasoned Salt, black and Aleppo peppers, and Worcestershire sauce to your blender jar, then add the vinegar(s) and ketchup and pulse to combine and finely chop the onion.
Note 3: adding the dry ingredients first, then covering with the onion, vinegar(s), and ketchup help to keep them in the dressing, and not blown up the side of the blender jar in processing. Not a huge deal, because you can always scrape the sides down and pulse another time or two anyway; but this works for me.
With the blender running, slowly add the canola oil through the opening in the lid until the dressing has emulsified into a creamy red-orange mixture.
Yeh. Not as vibrantly red as actual Catalina from the nice folk at Kraft, but very, very tasty, and, have I mentioned how much less sugar mine has compared to most other salad dressing recipes?
You will get about 12 ounces of quite nice dressing that will not separate.
Next… Taco Salad!