I've long been a fan of the delicious ginger salad dressing the local sushi restaurant serves over a simple iceberg lettuce salad. It's slightly sweet, slightly zesty, and has an interesting texture--a fine pulp settles on the lettuce and a bit of juice settles in the bowl's bottom. I've even asked the waiters what ingredients are in the delectable orange concoction...but alas, they will not tell me. My next step was to scan the net for the recipe. Easy, right? Nope. It seems that every Japanese restaurant has its own version of this basic dressing. I found some recipes for something called "Makato style" that sounded about right. But were they? Obviously, the only thing to do was to make 6 versions and do a taste test. Obviously.
The recipes had several common ingredients, which made grocery shopping muuuuch easier. Ginger...rice vinegar...mirin (a sweetened rice vinegar)...and onion. Each recipe had a few other ingredients, but they were all basics that I had on hand (and probably you will too).
To find mirin and other specialty stuff, we drove out to our local Asian grocery...man do I love that place. Piles of ginger. Piles. Huge bottles of Siracha for $3. 7 billion kinds of tea. Aloe drinks. Frozen meat buns. Mmmm.Not to mention $9 marble mortar/pestles...$10 bun steamers...etc.
Here are the ingredients all gathered. And yes, that really is my tablecloth...deal with it.
Recipes
Here are all 6 original recipes that I tested. I wish I had saved the websites so I could attribute each one...but alas, I did not. I will not disgrace anyone else by pretending Recipe #6 was written by any doofus other than me. The others were found by Googling "Japanese ginger salad dressing" and variations on the theme.
Recipe #1:
1 piece peeled ginger root
1/2 c rice wine vinegar
1T chopped onion
1T water
1/4 c vegetable oil
1t sesame oil
1T tomato paste
pinch sugar
pinch salt
2T soy sauce
Recipe #2:
1/4c chopped onions
1/4c peanut oil
1-1/2t rice vinegar
1T water
1T ginger root
1T celery
1T ketchup or tomato paste
2t soy sauce
1t sugar
1t lemon juice
1/3 clove garlic
1/3t pepper
dash salt
Recipe #3:
1 small carrot
2T mirin
2T rice vinegar
1T soy sauce
1/2t sesame oil
2T onion
1T prepared mustard
1T ginger
Recipe #4:
2 small carrots
4T mirin
4T rice vinegar
1t sesame oil
2T soy sauce
2T grated ginger
1/2lb silken tofu (very soft)
1/2" slice of a small red onion
1/4t sugar
1/2 small garlic clove
pinch salt
Recipe #5:
2t peanut oil
1/4c rice vinegar
1t sesame oil
2 medium carrots (6 baby carrots)
1" ginger root
2t sugar
Recipe #6:
1 shallot
15 mini carrots
2" ginger
6T mirin
1/4c water
Dash rice vinegar
Dash soy sauce
Dash salt
1t sugar
Creating the dressings
1. Peel the ginger. Peeling ginger can be a time sucker. You can save yourself a lot of trouble by purchasing large, relatively smooth ginger roots. The fewer lumps, the smoother the peeling will go. Trust me. Use a knife to cut off the skin, making sure to keep any body parts out of the knife's path. If you don't feel comfortable with this method, you can use a veggie peeler. I find it a bit too cumbersome, but it's servicable.
2. Prepare veggies for the food processor. Chop up all the vegetables to a size your food processor can handle. This list includes: carrots (I chopped the baby carrots into thirds), celery, garlic (halve the cloves), onion, and ginger.
Tip: Dealing with garlic. I freeze my cloves...lemme tell ya, it is magical how easy it is to prep frozen garlic. The paper almost wipes off the cloves...and you can snap off the butt of the clove WITH YOUR FINGERS. Try it. You'll thank me.
The vegetable matter is all chopped up.
Tip: Shallots vs Onions. A few days ago, I did not know what a shallot was. I'll admit it. Now, I can tell you that it is a tiny bulb vegetable...looks like a cross between an onion and garlic. It's garlic sized, with an onion-y taste...but not nearly as zippy as onion. I substituted shallots for onions in many of these recipes since the ginger didn't really need any help getting the zippiness across...
3. Measure out the veggies. After you pick a recipe to start with, scan through the ingredients list and measure the vegetable matter into the food processor.
4. Process the veggies. Pulse that blade until your veggies are finely pulverized. This is a good time to get out your aggressions vicariously. Pulsing rhythmically is also a good way to lay down an awesome rap beat. Give it a try.
Whir. Whir. Whirrrr. Whirwhirwhir. Whir whir.
Whir.
5. Add wet stuff. After the veggies are all nice and very tiny, add in the liquids/pastes from the recipe. Rice vinegar, mirin, water, soy sauce, lemon juice, tomato paste, mustard, tofu...you get the idea. Pulse a couple of times to mix well.
Tofu smashed up by hand on the left...machine-pulverized on the right. Clearly, you should use the food processor. It's just easier. Be warned that this recipe can't be processed all at once...at least not if you have a dinky little 3" deep 6" wide dish in your processor like I do.
6. Add dry stuff. Now that the mixture is all nice and moist, you can add in your sugar, salt, pepper...that's pretty much it for the dry ingredients, actually. Pulse a few times to mix.
7. Pour into a bowl and move on to the next one. Here are all 6 of the recipes. Rinse off any dirty tools between recipes...even though the versions are very similar, some of them have ingredients (SESAME OIL...ahem) that will totally taint the
next dressing.
Tip: Wet wipe, dry wipe. When you're cooking or baking, one of the best and easiest ways to make yourself stay sane as long as possible is to have one wet and one dry towel/dishcloth close at hand. When something inevitably spills or you get crap on your hands, these babies will help you clean up quickly. Endless applications...
Tasting Notes
Most of the recipes I used recommended allowing the dressings to refrigerate overnight so the flavors could properly meld. Well, I did that, but I wanted to taste these suckas immediately! Like hell was I gonna spend a couple hours making these damn things and not taste them til the next day. Puh-lease. So these tasting notes may very well change when I retaste tomorrow...but here they be anyway.
Recipe #1
Too vinegary...way too liquidy. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhh. (That was a buzzer sounding my disapproval of Recipe #1.)
Recipe #2
Almost the right taste! It's a bit too "dark" tasting...perhaps less soy sauce would fix that. Texture is ok.
Recipe #3
Wrong. Too liquidy. Too vinegary. This one basically assaulted me. Too strong, and too zesty. Naaaasty. I feel pretty confident that, unless magical fairies somehow correct these flavors overnight, I'm going to be pitching this one down the sink tomorrow.
Recipe #4
This is not a good clone of the original dressing (texture and flavor are completely different)...but it is definitely a delicious and worthwhile recipe. The tofu gives the dressing a smooth, creamy body without being too heavy. The flavors are subtle...slightly sweet, slightly zesty. I'm going to use this batch for sure! Which is good, since I put in a whole 12 oz of tofu (rather than just the 8 the recipe wanted).
Recipe #5
I was so psyched when I finished this one...the following thoughts occurred in quick succession. "The color is almost perfect! Oh, and the texture looks spot on...is this The One?! I'll just taste it now...NOOOOOO!!! Vinegar!!!!"
Recipe #6
This was my follow-up to #5. I figured I'd substitute water for the vinegar, because that was the obvious issue with #5. However...I may have gotten a bit overzealous. I popped in some other stuff that maybe I didn't need to...and this ended up being overpoweringly carroty and sweet, with an unpleasant opposing aftertaste of wicked strong ginger.
This was because I only had one more inch of ginger root left, so I figured I'd just use it up so it wouldn't get wasted. Turns out there was already far too much ginger zip in here...and of course, it was right at this point that I figured out #5 would be just perfect if I substituted water for vinegar and left everything else alone. But now I had no more ginger to test that theory... le sigh.
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12 hours later...
I pulled the dressings out of the fridge this afternoon and re-tasted to see if any melding or fairy visitations had gone on. Joe tasted them with me. Here are our thoughts:
#1: Smokey taste (must be the sesame oil). Still too vinegary...but could make a good marinade, perhaps.
#2: Good texture...similar to the original dressing. Garlicy. Good! After tasting them all, this was the closest to the original dressing, but not quite right.
#3: Too vinegary. Subdued from yesterday, but still awful.
#4: Sweetened up overnight. I liked it better yesterday! Booo.
#5: The most vinegary. Awful. Can't even taste the ginger due to the astringent flavor.
#6: Still sweet and carroty, with a POWERFUL GINGER AFTERTASTE.
Conclusion: I don't think there is rice vinegar in the original. The recipes with vinegar are overpowered by it. My best guess is that the original dressing has a little ginger, a little bit less carrot, water, some mirin, and a bit of onion.
I'll update when I've had the chance to run out and get some ginger.
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