Green Goddess Dressing

A fresh herb salad dressing that is a bright, creamy classic.

Bowl with salad greens, chunks of avocado and pieces of blood orange, topped with a bright green dressing.
Salad with avocado, blood orange, and Green Goddess dressing.

I made Green Goddess Dressing for the first time last year. I don't remember what drove me to make it; I'm pretty sure I'd never had it before, and curiosity about it had creeped in over the years. I think I felt a vague responsibility to have it at least once, as a Californian.

A small salad dressing cruet filled with bright a bright green, creamy dressing.
Green Goddess dressing

The original recipe is from right here in San Francisco, where it was created at the Palace Hotel in 1923, in tribute to the play The Green Goddess. The original recipe called for parsley, tarragon, chives, scallions, anchovies, mayonnaise, and vinegar.

The recipe has shifted a ton over the years. Now the name "Green Goddess" has turned into a sort of catch-all for anything made with a bunch of green stuff blended together and kinda creamy. Lots of modern recipes tend to be lighter than the original, and call for yogurt, basil, capers, avocado, etc. They can have very little overlap with the original dressing's ingredients, sharing only a color.

I wanted to try something closer to the original classic, to see what made it famous in the first place. I didn't find any one single recipe that stood out to me as "the one," so I compared a bunch of the more old-school recipes, experimented a bit, and came up with my own recipe that uses the classic ingredients.

In my opinion, tarragon is especially key if you're aiming for the original flavor profile. It doesn't call for much, but tarragon has such a distinctive flavor that I don't bother making this dressing if I don't have tarragon.

I immediately fell in love with this dressing! It's bright and fresh thanks to the acid and herbs, but also creamy and rich. It's especially good on a green salad with avocado and citrus. I also tried it as a sauce for salmon, along with some roasted cherry tomatoes, and it was amazing.

A piece of salmon is topped with Green Goddess dressing and yellow, orange, and red cherry tomatoes. There are garlicky green beans on the side.
Salmon topped with Green Goddess dressing and roasted cherry tomatoes

My ingredient list has volumes of herbs given in a chopped state, but I don't actually chop them. I eyeball the whole herbs to guess the amount it would take to get the chopped amount, toss the herbs (minus the stems) unchopped into the blender, and let the blender do the work for me. (If I had my amounts as metric weights instead of volumes, it would be much easier to be consistent! I'll update it at some point, that'll be a good future project.) I do mince the garlic and mash the anchovies first, just to be sure I don't wind up with a stray lump in the blender, but they'd probably do fine whole as long as you made sure they blended up thoroughly.

Ingredients

  • 6 tbsp mayonnaise
  • 4 tbsp sour cream
  • ½ tbsp chopped chives
  • ½-¾ cup chopped parsley
  • 1 tbsp chopped tarragon
  • 2 anchovies, mashed into paste
  • 1 large garlic clove, minced
  • 2 tbsp lemon juice
  • 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
  • large pinch salt

Instructions

Place all ingredients in a blender, and blend the bajeezus out of them until they’re lovely and green.

Adjust to taste. Add more mayo, more vinegar/lemon juice, more salt, another anchovy, or more parsley/tarragon.

Store in the fridge for a week.

Here's a printer-friendly Google Doc version of the recipe:

Green Goddess Dressing
RECIPE Green Goddess Dressing Makes about 1¼ cup Ingredients 6 tbsp mayonnaise 4 tbsp sour cream ½ tbsp chopped chives ½-¾ cup chopped parsley 1 tbsp chopped tarragon 2 anchovies, mashed into paste 1 large garlic clove, minced 2 tbsp lemon juice 1 tbsp red wine vinegar large pinch salt Preparat…