A Vitamix will make creamy salad dressing from nuts, and you can easily customize the flavor. We ate this dressing on a massaged kale salad, but it’s also good on a simple lettuce salad. The dressing is mild and creamy, slightly sweet with a hint of tartness, and has a light kick from thyme.

Vitamix Macadamia Dressing Ingredients

1 Tbsp water
1 Tbsp lemon juice
most of 1 medium-large tangerine, peeled & deseeded (100 g)
¼ cup macadamia nuts (35 g)
1 Tbsp fresh thyme (loosely packed)
pinch of salt

This makes just over half a cup of dressing. I blended in the 32-oz container. If you only have a wide G-Series container, you would probably need to double the recipe. (If you have a 48 or 64-oz container with 3″-blade, that will work fine with the listed amounts, and an S-Series will work great as well.)

Place ingredients in blender, start on low and ramp up to max speed. If any bits of nuts get stuck to the upper walls of the container, you can stop the blender and scrape down the sides with a spatula, then run it a bit longer. Total blending time ~40 seconds.

I have a new favorite spatula, which came in handy for scraping down the sides and making sure I didn’t waste any of the dressing when I was getting it out of the container. I previously reviewed the Vitamix-branded nylon spatulas, which I still like, but I now usually prefer the iSi silicone slim spatula. (More detailed spatula review coming soon.)

You could also use an orange or orange juice in place of the tangerine, and other herbs or even garlic instead of thyme.

For a massaged kale salad, wash the kale, de-spine it, cut it into strips, then knead it with a pinch of course salt and a bit of olive oil for a few minutes, until it becomes noticeably softer and more tender (it shrinks and appears greener as well). The salad pictured above also had two sliced Persian cucumbers. Tasty!

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