There are perhaps hundreds of thousands of recipes for salad dressings — sauces that can dress greens or other dishes. Almost all of them can be distilled into three essential elements.
“The most important thing about any dressing is to strike a proper balance of salt, fat and acid,” writes Samin Nosrat in her book on the elements of cooking, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.” Individually, those three components are the most basic of seasonings for all food, working to enhance flavor as it hits our tongue and comes into contact with our saliva.
