Review: Walden Farms Russian Salad Dressing

A comment on a past Haagen-Dazs post mocked me for complaining about the cost of Haagen-Dazs products and yet ignoring the fact that my "beloved" (their word) Walden Farms products are sometimes equally or more expensive.  True, guilty as charged as I've clearly done a lot of Walden Farms reviews and only rarely have complained about the cost. Since I do love Walden Farms for some absurd reason, I'm led to review another one of their products with this Walden Farms Russian Salad Dressing review.  I picked up this twelve ounce bottle at Marsh for $3.50 and as always, it's sugar free, calorie free, etc.

Just like a lot of these Walden Farms dressings, there's not a lot to describe here.  It's an almost unholy orange and has a slight acidic smell.  As time has gone on, Walden Farms has tweaked their recipe and that has made these dressings thicker than the ones that I reviewed in the early days of the blog.   According to the ingredient list, there was also supposedly some pickle relish in here, but I couldn't see any of that at all when I was examining it.  Other than that, there's not a whole lot else to say here, so I'll just dive right into the taste.

As with any Walden Farms product, I expect a certain degree of acidity when I taste it and that was certainly the case with this Russian dressing. It was not the most acidic of all the dressing I've tried, but it certainly was strong. The only thing that saved this from being out of control on that front was the faux creaminess that the Walden Farms chemists have managed to incorporate here. Typical Russian dressing has a little bite to it, but in this case the bite was a bit too much.  As for the aforementioned pickle relish, well it surprised me by sneaking up on me.  I was going in for a second taste and all of a sudden I felt what I thought was a tiny piece of diced pickle.  Not huge, but it was at least nice to know that the ingredient list was deceiving me.  It also did break up the dressing a texture a bit, but not enough to make the acidity more bearable.

Buy It or Fly By It? There was too much bite and acidity here, so I give this a FLY BY IT rating. That said, I mixed this with the Walden Farms Blue Cheese dressing and that cooled it down a bit and made it palatable. On its own though, this is just not a great effort and is worthy of being bypassed.

FLY BY IT!!