The Secret to Making Mouth-Watering Homemade Salad Dressing, According to a Meal Prep Pro

Growing up, most of your salad dressings probably came in plastic, store-bought bottles. In fact, with how easy, affordable, and accessible they are, your fridge may still be filled with them. But once you learn how easy it is to make your own homemade salad dressing, you'll never step foot in that

grocery store aisle again.

Dini Klein, the founder of

Prep + Rally, a family-friendly meal prep subscription service, recently joined Brightly founder Laura Wittig on an episode of

Good Together. While chatting about the benefits of

meal prepping, Klein shared her trick for making creamy and delicious homemade salad dressings you can enjoy all week long.

While most people whisk or shake their ingredients to combine them, Klein says the secret to a top-notch salad dressing is using an immersion blender—aka a mini handheld blender. Instead of adding your ingredients to a blender, you add the blender—essentially a wand with blades on the end—to your container of choice. In Klein's case, that's a Mason jar.

"The key to making a great dressing is, number one, to have an immersion blender. I always use wide-mouth Mason jars. It fits the head of the immersion blender right in there," she says. "It's the quickest thing to do, and the quickest thing to clean. By blending with an immersion blender, it also emulsifies it really nicely for you."

Klein loves throwing in a full clove of

garlic for extra flavor, plenty of herbs, and even

leftovers you don't want to go to waste—like

strawberries for a sweet touch. You can play chef utilizing what you already have to create creamy salad dressings, as well as sauces you can drizzle over baked veggies and grain bowls.

"Once you start making your dressings, you kind of get a sense of different ratios," she says. "I'm all about tasting. [Taste] as you go, and [know] how to layer and build flavors. Like to know when maybe I need a little bit more acid or maybe I need a little bit of salt. That's really the key."

One simple recipe to start with? On a recent video shoot, Klein says she combined a handful of ingredients in a Mason jar and used her immersion blender to give her a super-creamy sauce: "It was the easiest cilantro sauce," she says. "It was literally just mayo, cilantro, a whole bunch of lemon juice, salt, pepper, and some garlic. That was it."

So instead of buying yet another store-bought bottle of salad dressing, use Klein's tips to make your own right at home. You'll save money, reduce waste (use up your

food scraps and leftovers!), and build up a collection of tasty recipes you'll want to enjoy over and over again.