Dill pickle dressing, the perfect tangy dressing recipe for summer salads, stir fries, roasted vegetables, or baked fish. You can even use it as a sandwich spread! This dill pickle dressing can be made creamy with yogurt or mayo, or dairy-free with olive oil as a vinaigrette. It’s full of flavour and easy to whip up in just a few minutes.

This dill pickle dressing is so good, I’ve been using so much of it lately. It’s tangy, flavourful, and easy to make, not to mention you can put it on almost any savoury dish. I like to make a large batch of it and keep it in the fridge for 3 or 4 days’ worth of meals.

I use this dressing for so many dishes – warm roasted radish salad, coleslaw, as a dip with baked fish or roasted potato fries. I also love pairing it with roasted carrots or other root vegetables. Yeah – just slather it on everything, really!

Creamy Dressing or Olive Oil Vinaigrette

The best part is that you can make this recipe according to the ingredients you have in your house, for the most part. By that I mean – you can make it creamy with mayonnaise or Greek yogurt, or you can make it a vinaigrette-style dressing with olive oil. How awesome is that?

Pickle Brine

The main feature for this recipe is, of course, the infamous dill pickle (and its brine). The idea for this recipe came to me a long time ago: I kept looking at all the brine left over in my dill pickle jar and started to wonder what else I could do with it. So, I did some research, which led to me making many, many batches of dill pickle dressing over the span of several months. This recipe is the result of all that, and it’s one of the many ways I use up pickle brine now.

Uses For Pickle Brine

I thought I would list a few other uses for pickle brine too, as food for thought. Also this recipe obviously won’t use up THAT much pickle brine. It’s just seems more interesting (at least to me) to repurpose the leftover pickle brine, rather than throw it away entirely.

Note: Also, of course, if your pickle brine is really old and contaminated, don’t eat it. These uses for pickle brine relate to fresh brine – you know, when you just finished eating all the pickles out of it…

• Add more clean chopped vegetables back into your pickle brine. Yes, you can simply just make more pickles! These are what I lovingly refer to as “fridge pickles” and they keep for 2-3 weeks in the fridge, in fresh pickle brine. Mine are usually eaten within a week though, being honest. I like to use onions, beets, and carrots for this.
• Add pickle brine to your potato salad. Just a few tablespoons will do it, but it adds some great flavour!
• Mix pickle brine into a creamy sandwich filling. I often make a filling for lunch sandwiches – mayonnaise, spices, chopped celery, and diced pickled onions mixed with either canned tuna, canned salmon or cooked chicken breast. A spoonful or two of pickle brine mixed into this sandwich filling is super tasty.
• Add a quarter cup of pickle brine to the water for boiling potatoes or pasta. I often just do this with straight-up vinegar too or leftover brine from my pickled pink onions. It adds a little extra flavour to the potatoes or pasta without an overwhelmingly vinegar taste.
• Add a spoonful or two of brine to your soup! I love doing this with borscht, monster soup, or monster stew. The brine fits perfectly with these flavours.

Okay, now onto the recipe!

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Dill Pickle Dressing

A versatile dressing, ready in just 15 minutes. This recipe makes about 1-2 cups of dressing. Ingredient amounts provided for both a full batch (2 cups) and half-size batch (1 cup).

Note: Add 2-3 tablespoons of filtered water if you’d like the dressing to be more runny.

Ingredients

Half-Batch (about 1 cup)

• 1 medium-sized dill pickle
• ½ cup Greek yogurt, mayonnaise, or olive oil
• ¼ cup pickle brine
• ¼ cup fresh herbs, chopped (parsley, dill, mint)
• 1-2 tbsp garlic, minced
• 2 tsp Dijon mustard
• 2 tsp maple syrup
• ½ tsp ground paprika
• salt and pepper, to taste

Full Batch (about 2 cups)

• 2 medium-sized dill pickles
• 1 cup Greek yogurt, mayonnaise, or olive oil
• ½ cup pickle brine
• ½ cup fresh herbs, chopped (parsley, dill, mint)
• 3-4 tbsp garlic, minced
• 1 ½ tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 ½ tbsp maple syrup
• 1 tsp ground paprika
• salt and pepper, to taste

Tools

• mixing bowl or jug
• mixing spoon or spatula
• measuring spoons
• measuring cups
• knife
• cutting board
• garlic mincer
• optional: herb scissors
• optional: blender or food processor

Instructions

1. Add the mayonnaise, Greek yogurt or olive oil to a mixing bowl or container.
2. Mince the dill pickle and garlic, then chop the fresh herbs.
3. Add the minced pickle and garlic, herbs, mustard, maple syrup, and other seasonings to the mixing bowl.
4. Stir until well mixed, and enjoy!

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Dill Pickle Dressing Swaps & Ad-Ins

You can also easily customize this recipe to suit your personal taste, or better reflect the dish you pair it with. 

If using mayonnaise, for instance, it could be any type of mayonnaise – regular, low-fat, Kewpie, olive oil-based, avocado-based, vegan, etc. 

Want to make this dressing spicy? Try adding some hot sauce (eg. Sriracha or Tabasco), minced jalapeño peppers, or a little ground cayenne pepper.

Don’t like paprika? Easy fix, just omit it. You could also swap the maple syrup with honey if desired.

So, did you make this dill pickle dressing? Let me know!