Japanese Sesame Salad Dressing

It's been a while since inspiration has struck to make anything exciting- these days I sort of just make every second thing I see on blogs/pintrest. Not that that's not exciting, but I haven't had one of those super-exciting 'I NEED to make this' moments.

Until I saw this recipe.


It probably doesn't sound that interesting to most of you.......but let me explain. I had my first taste of Japanese sesame dressing on a cold chilli winter day in Hong Kong, when we made our way to one of my favourite udon noodle restaurants there, and I accidentally ordered an udon salad instead of a bubbling udon noodle soup (served in a hot pot) as I had intended- no thanks to my terrible inability to read the majority of Chinese characters! After the initial disappointment of having a cold dish on a freezing day though, I was very much surprised to find that the salad was unbelievably good, and worth having, even despite the cold weather!

We've since sourced a similar dressing at the Asian supermarket here (although it is ridiculously expensive), though the good brands are much harder to find, so I was pretty excited to find a recipe for it (from scratch! yay!) on one of my favourite food blogs, Just One Cookbook. And it's also ridiculously quick and simple to make too! :)

Surprisingly, it was a quite different to the bottled version I had at home in that it had a much stronger sesame taste, whereas the bottled version tasted much stronger of sesame oil (and upon reading the product label, I was not surprised to find that sesame oil was a major constituent of the dressing, and consequently its fat content was pretty high!). The recipe is easy to adjust- I just added more vinegar, sesame oil and sugar until it was to my liking then added it to my originally-udon-salad-but-turned-soba-salad-when-I-realised-I-had-no-udon salad. I served it alongside teriyaki chicken as I'd had it at the restaurant- it was a great lunch :)

Japanese Roasted Sesame Dressing
Recipe from Just One Cookbook

3 Tbsp. roasted white sesame seeds
2 Tbsp. Japanese mayonnaise
2 Tbsp. rice vinegar
1½ Tbsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. sugar
½ tsp. mirin
½ tsp. Sesame Oil

1. Put sesame seeds in a frying pan and toast them on low heat. When 2-3 sesame seeds start popping, remove from the heat.
2. Grind the toasted sesame seeds with a motor and pestle until smooth.
3. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and whisk everything together. Drizzle on top of a simple salad of ice burg lettuce topped with tomatoes, boiled eggs, wakame, and corn. You can keep the dressing in the refrigerator for up to a week.