Cheese
Cheese, especially new varieties and blends of old favorites, is the perfect ingredient for product developers to use in the development of salad dressings. Salad dressing as a category abounds with creativity in the form of new flavors, new options for fat and calorie content, and new application ideas. In terms of flavor, cheese is used as a prominent flavor contributor in many new specialty varieties, including combinations such as dill cream and Cheddar, and Hawaiian blue cheese with pineapple and mandarin orange.

As fat-free continues to emerge as a leading segment of this category, manufacturers are looking at opportunities to use high-flavored cheeses to boost flavor intensity in products such as vinaigrettes. And as salad dressing manufacturers work to broaden applications beyond the traditional green salad by encouraging the use of dressing as an ingredient in dips, marinades, sauces and toppings, cheese may offer specific benefits for flavor development.

Also, for lowfat dressings, cottage cheese serves as a base in cream-style salad dressings. It maintains the desired cream-style texture while also contributing dairy notes and fewer calories than cream alone.

Ideas:

• Consider aged cheeses for intense flavor
• Look to ethnic and regional cuisines for new flavor combination ideas
• Use a new variety for something different in traditional products—Asiago instead of Parmesan in Caesar dressing

Suggested cheeses:

• Asiago
• Blue
• Cheddar
• Cottage
• Feta
• Parmesan
• Romano

Concentrated and Dry Milk Ingredients

• Form and stabilize salad dressing emulsions
• Undenatured dairy proteins are able to form rigid, heat-induced irreversible gels that hold water and fat, and provide structural support in salad dressings, especially highly viscous creamy-style dressings
• Provide water-binding properties that are very important in formulating reduced-fat salad dressings because of the fatlike attributes such as lubricity and mouthfeel they contribute
• Enhance the appearance of salad dressings, particularly reduced-fat, creamy-style products, by providing opacity
• The milkfat present in concentrated and dry milk ingredients adds richness to certain salad dressings

Whey

• Forms stable emulsions over prolonged periods of time under a variety of storage conditions, even in acid emulsions such as salad dressing
• Because of the exceptional gel-forming abilities and water-holding capacities of whey proteins, they can act as a component of a fat mimetic system
• Delivers exceptional nutritional value to salad dressings, including amino acids that are readily digestible and completely bioavailable
• Provides an excellent source of calcium, an essential nutrient not readily available in other regularly consumed foods: 100 grams of dry sweet whey contains about 770 mg of calcium and 100 grams of dry acid whey contains about 2,280 mg of calcium
• Contributes to a food’s healthful image and clean label, and ultimately to the sale of the food
• Maintains solubility under acidic conditions, providing good emulsification
• Emulsification properties of whey ingredients aid in the dispersion of fat and/or oil in salad dressing; efficient dispersion can help reduce the fat level in some formulas
• Whey proteins enhance water-binding, an important functional property in salad dressing, especially in the reduced-fat and fat-free varieties (the ability of the salad dressing to retain water reduces cost)
• WPC and WPI can provide fatlike attributes such as lubricity and mouthfeel, as well as add opacity to lowfat formulations
• In many salad dressings, dry whole whey is an excellent bulking agent, increasing the level of total solids with one of the least expensive solids ingredients
• Dry whole whey is highly functional in creamy and premium-type salad dressings