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Olive Garden Copy Cat Recipe Salad Dressing

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I am big on copycat recipes.

I love the salad dressings at restaurants, the special sauces, the breads, the dipping, and all the fresh spices! I am a decent cook (not so much in the baking department) but I can cook up a mean piece of chicken if I feel like it.

The other night I wanted a salad, but wanted it to taste like it came from Olive Garden – minus the drive over there.

With gas prices the way they are, we have to figure out how to cut corners without cutting our taste buds out of the equation. So I scoured the web for copy cat recipes regarding Olive Gardens Italian dressing and there were plenty to choose from! Most looked the same so it was a guess on which one would get the closest.

We dove right in according to the ingredients we had on hand.

Here is the recipe we used, but with our own alterations:

Olive Garden Copy Cat Recipe Salad Dressing

  • 1/2  cup  mayonnaise
  • 1/3  cup  white vinegar
  • 1  teaspoon  vegetable oil
  • 2  tablespoons  Parmesan cheese
  • 2  tablespoons  Romano cheese
  • 1/4  teaspoon  garlic salt
  • 1/2  teaspoon  Italian seasoning
  • 1/2  teaspoon  dried parsley
  • 1  tablespoon  lemon juice

We actually found this recipe was super runny and tad too tart to be enjoyable long term, so in our house, I ended up adding a lot more Hellmans. It made the dressing creamier, probably a bit closer to a Carrabba’s House Dressing over Olive Gardens Italian.

I ended up changing the 1/2  cup mayo to a full cup and then let chill in the fridge for atleast an hour. I also added some sugar to counteract the vinegar flavor, which really helped tone it down.

Make sure you seal off or cover the dressing. The smells have a way of overpowering the fridge.

Charlotte was the Chef for this occasion and did all the hard work:

(as you can see, Charlotte is um…dressing herself lately..they both have purple so apparently they match)

I did the dishes for her.

Other versions of this Olive Garden Salad Dressing Recipe to check out:

 

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18 thoughts on “Olive Garden Copy Cat Recipe Salad Dressing”

  1. I like to check out copycat recipes too! I was able to find one for this sweet corn bread from El Torito and have made it a few times.

  2. How sweet that Charlotte wanted to help make dinner. I also love the salads from both Olive Garden and Carrabas so either one would have been good to me. I, too, would have probably have left out most of the vinegar and used a red wine or balsamic vinegar (because that’s all I have to cook with).
    As for Charlotte’s outfit ~ I think she looks adorable, love the eclectic look, hey, they both have purple in them, makes sense to me. 🙂

  4. I love Olive Garden dressings a lot. Yours looks so yummy! I wouldn’t use all the vinegar the recipe called for LOL for me few drops, less than a half teaspoon would be enough considering the lemon juice too 😉 But your little chef is adorable as always, love her outfit 😀

  5. She is too cute! I remember when Owen dressed himself … he decided he needed puppy pj pants to go under his firetruck dog overall shorts with a red shirt under and a button up red/black shirt over the overalls …. def pic worthy lol! Sounds like a yum dressing.

  9. Olive Garden is one of my favorites, I think I’ll be trying this for lunch!
    My daughter loves to dress herself, and she says the same thing, like, “They both have stripes Ma, they match!” As the shirt has diagonal stripes and pants are horizontal, lol!

  13. I saw a copycat version of this dressing somewhere and I remember it called for dried pectin, which is supposed to be what thickens it. As good as that dressing is, I’d like to be able to copy it too!

    And Charlotte looks adorable! Kaitlyn dresses herself and sometimes she doesn’t match but I just figure yay, I didn’t have to get her dressed LOL

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