Thousand Island Dressing Is Back and Better Than Ever

By Steven Satterfield

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I have recently rediscovered sun-dried tomatoes. They were so overused in the 1990s that everyone eventually grew tired of them, and for years I just completely disregarded them as a viable culinary ingredient—until now. And I have a wedge salad to thank for it.

Hundreds of years before these wrinkly disks made it into every pasta salad and specialty grocery store of the ’90s, they were a preservation method used in Southern Italy. At the peak of tomato season, plum tomatoes would be split in half, salted, and dried for several days on ceramic tile roofs under the hot summer sun.

Today, most are produced in commercial dehydrators or by laying the tomatoes out flat in tarp-covered fields to dry in the sun and inspected daily for quality and shrinkage. Tomatoes lose about 90 percent of their water weight in the drying process, but most of their nutrients—including potassium, manganese, lycopene, iron, copper, and vitamins C and K—remain in high concentrations. Their flavor is similarly concentrated, creating intense little powerhouses of acid and umami.

Dry-packed tomatoes can be leathery and jerky-like. When using them, I recommend rehydrating them in hot water first to give them a little life back and make them pliable again. But my favorite sun-dried tomatoes are packed in extra-virgin olive oil. The fat gives them an unctuous texture and a deeper layer of flavor, which I think makes for a better-quality eating experience all around. Oil-packed tomatoes are easier to chop, process, or blend right away; you don't have to wait for them to plump up in hot water.

When I set out to make this recipe for a sun-dried tomato salad dressing, my expectation was that it would be brimming with tanginess and umami. It would have just the right texture to coat the crisp romaine leaves of The New Wedge Salad in my cookbook Vegetable Revelations—but what I wasn't expecting was a dressing that was more like Thousand Island.

Thousand Island, which was invented more than a century ago and is named after an archipelago that straddles the US–Canada border, is a mixture of ketchup, mayonnaise, chili paste (or sauce), and pickle relish. In my recipe, I blend sun-dried tomatoes with an egg and oil emulsion (mayo, essentially) and a good amount of acid, both from lime juice and apple cider vinegar. Because the tomatoes make the dressing a little thick, I do what any good Southerner would: I thin it out with buttermilk. There are no pickles in this dressing, but the buttermilk's acidity gives the mixture the zing that a pickle would bring, and there is chili powder added, so…ka-ching! I made an updated Thousand Island and wasn't even trying to do so. And let me tell you, I think it's actually better. (And if you dislike sweet pickle relish like I do, I think you’ll agree.)

Once used as a condiment for a fisherman's shore dinner, Thousand Island grew in popularity as a general condiment, hitting all those notes of creamy, tangy, salty, zippy, and satisfying. The dressing became very popular in mid-20th century in households across America, and it may be the inspiration for the "special sauce" for McDonald's Big Mac (although at least one former McDonald's employee has claimed that there's no ketchup in that sauce at all) and the "spread" on the In-N-Out burger.

This type of dressing is very versatile, so don't just confine it to a lettuce-based salad. Use it in place of tartar sauce for fried fish, as a condiment for potatoes or other vegetables, or as a spread on your favorite sandwich.

For any home cook—or professional chef—it's easy to get stuck in a rut of making the same things on repeat. Try gathering some ingredients that you haven't played with before and update your pantry or condiment shelf. Or, think about ingredients that may have been popular in the past and are ready for a reboot, like those sun-dried tomatoes that we all wrote off as a ’90s trend but in the end proved to be timeless.