This Copycat Olive Garden Salad Dressing Contains Less Than Half The Sugar And Is Ready In 20 Minutes

Olive Garden's Signature Italian Dressing is a mouthwatering topper for salads thanks to its bright and tangy ingredients, including Romano cheese, vinegar, and dehydrated garlic. Fans of this dressing likely don't want to take a trip to the restaurant every time they get a craving, and with grocery prices having risen over the past year, they might be inclined to skip the bottled version in stores as well. That's why we've created an easy copycat recipe of Olive Garden's salad dressing with simple ingredients that you can whip up at home in 20 minutes. It also contains only 0.2 grams of sugar per 1 fluid ounce compared to Olive Garden's 2 grams for the same serving size, making it a viable alternative for those who prefer a low-sugar diet.

For wet ingredients, you'll need extra virgin olive oil, white wine vinegar, mayonnaise, lemon juice, and water. Dry ingredients include grated Parmesan cheese, Italian seasoning — which you can also make at home with the right ingredients — garlic powder, salt, onion powder, sugar, and black pepper. Whisk them together and refrigerate the dressing before pouring it over your favorite leafy greens. This recipe provides eight servings from about 1 cup of dressing. And although this copycat also contains sugar, it has a much smaller quantity than Olive Garden's. But why is that?

Olive Garden's website doesn't reveal the ingredients of its dressing, but its bottled dressings are distributed by the salad dressing company Marzetti, which does list ingredients. Sugar is the fourth ingredient in Olive Garden's Signature Italian Dressing. Since ingredients on product labels are arranged in descending order according to weight, sugar is one of the higher-quantity components. Yet only ¼ teaspoon of it is used in our copycat recipe to recreate the same flavor. Without knowing Olive Garden's recipe measurements, though, it's hard to say how much sugar is added during the manufacturing process.

In addition to standard sugar, dextrose is the 11th ingredient found in Olive Garden's dressing. It's a starch-derived simple sugar used to sweeten numerous commercial foods. This additional sweetener could account for the higher amount of total sugar in Olive Garden's recipe compared to homemade. In general, store-bought salad dressings tend to contain added sugar, especially low-fat versions that may incorporate more sugar to make up for reduced fat, so Olive Garden isn't an outlier here.

The restaurant chain does sell a light dressing, but it contains the same amount of sugar as the regular kind despite not containing dextrose. However, this could stem instead from the addition of lemon juice concentrate. The major differences in its nutritional content are its reduced fat and sodium. Quitting the store-bought dressings and making them at home will be your best bet if you want a low-sugar alternative and want to know all of the ingredients going into your meal. Our copycat also works just as well with various ingredient substitutions.