Greek Yogurt Belongs In Your Salad

It's that portion of the late summer when my garden and the farmer's market are bursting with bountiful lettuce, stunning tomatoes, and succulent sweet corn. Eating anything but salad for lunch seems criminal.

Recently though, as I've begun adding acidic garden tomatoes to my tangy vinaigrette salad dressings, I started to find the whole dish too tangy. The tomatoes' acidity teamed up with the balsamic or champagne vinegar and overpowered my tongue. Adding more olive oil only made the dressings feel greasy and out of balance.

The solution, luckily, was already in my fridge: plain Greek yogurt. A scoop of that whisked into my standard balsamic vinaigrette helped cut the vinegar's zing and added a degree of rich creaminess. And there's no complicated recipe to follow: Just add a couple tablespoons of plain Greek yogurt to the vinegar along with whatever else you mix in (I like honey and a squirt of Dijon, or black pepper and basil). Then, cut back just slightly on the amount of oil you'd use, and whisk that all together.

There you have it: A dressing that's creamy, rich, not too biting, and smoothly coating all those gorgeous tomatoes.