Thoughts on sweet salad dressings? Alex and I are all about savory sweet combos, so this raspberry vinaigrette situation couldn’t get much better. A green salad with berries, nuts, and lightly sweet dressing to us is one of the best side dishes there is. Here we’ve taken ripe red raspberries and dressed them up with a little balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and maple syrup. The result? The perfect blend of tart, savory, and sweet that will smother your salads to perfection. Side bonus: it’s a healthy salad dressing, too! Keep reading for how to make it.
How to make raspberry vinaigrette
This raspberry vinaigrette is based on our strawberry salad dressing, another favorite in this household! Adding fruit to a salad dressing is one way to make it healthier than most salad dressings. Blending in fruit makes the dressing creamy without adding more oil. So you can get away with less oil and more flavor! Using this fruit trick, this one weighs in at only 43 calories per tablespoon. In this raspberry vinaigrette, you could use various types of vinegar — it’s especially a great place for those fancy flavored vinegars you can get in specialty olive oil and vinegar stores. (You know the ones!) Standard balsamic vinegar red wine vinegar, or apple cider vinegar work, but you could even use raspberry vinegar if you happen to have it onhand. As with any salad dressing, the quality of ingredients, like olive oil and vinegar, is key to good flavor. With a little maple syrup added for sweetness, this raspberry vinaigrette turns out tangy, bright, sweet and oh so good on a salad! Here’s how to make this raspberry vinaigrette:
In a small blender or immersion blender, blend together raspberries, maple syrup, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil. Pass the mixture through a fine mesh strainer (to remove the raspberry seeds). Enjoy!
How to serve it
A sweet dressing like this raspberry vinaigrette is perfect on salads that also have a sweet element, like berries or other fruit. Here are a few salad recipes we’d recommend to get you started: but feel free to play with the concepts to make them your own!
Blackberry Salad with Balsamic VinaigretteStrawberry Spinach SaladStrawberry Salad with Balsamic VinaigretteSpinach Apple SaladPear Pomegranate SaladSimplest Green Salad with Balsamic Vinaigrette
Need an immersion blender?
An immersion blender is also called a “stick blender” or hand blender. It’s useful for making pureed soups because you can place it right into the pot instead of transferring hot soup to a blender and then back. It’s also nice for small batch blending like for this raspberry vinaigrette. Because the quantity of ingredients is fairly small, it can be hard to get it to blend in a standard-size blender. So, it’s nice to have an immersion blender for this type of job! (We don’t own a small blender, so this is what we do.) Here’s one we recommend, if you’re looking to get your hands on one:
More raspberry recipes
Got more berries on hand? Great! We’ve got lots of ways to use them. Make sure to try these tasty raspberry recipes:
Drizzle Raspberry Compote or Raspberry Sauce on pancakes, cakes, and moreGo for frozen Raspberry Sherbet or Raspberry SorbetBlend up a zingy Raspberry SmoothieTry Raspberry Iced Tea or Easy Raspberry LemonadeTry Raspberry Syrup in cocktails like the bright pink Clover Club
This raspberry vinaigrette recipe is…
Vegetarian, gluten-free, vegan, plant-based, dairy-free, refined sugar free, and naturally sweet.
Looking for salad dressings?
Outside of this recipe, here are a few of our very favorite salad dressing recipes: No reviews
Creamy Pesto Salad DressingHealthy Ranch Dressing Homemade Italian Dressing Caesar Dressing Recipe Strawberry Salad DressingCreamy Avocado DressingThousand Island Dressing Best Balsamic VinaigretteGreek Salad Dressing Blue Cheese DressingTop 10 Homemade Salad Dressing Recipes Classic French Dressing
Last updated: January 2021
