The Department of Salad Dressing Room™️

An occasional feature highlighting dressings and other salad accoutrements. Today: Carrot Miso Dressing you can't get in a bottle.

I SPEND AN ENORMOUS amount of time in the Department of Salad Dressing Room, trying on new vinaigrettes, dips, sauces, and splashes. Because, as I’ve said before: Salads get weary wearing the same old shaggy dressings.

The idea behind the Dressing Room is that people tend to fall in love with a few dressings, get tired of them, and then blame salad. Which is like reading the same book a hundred times and giving it a bad rating on Goodreads with a note claiming the plot seems overfamiliar.

Here’s a Dressing Room featuring a chunky Parmesan walnut dressing and another inspired by chunky tartar sauce:

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But we’ve been featuring solo dressing recipes for a very long time. Here is my convertible Green Goddess Dip/Dressing, from one of my earliest issues, back in November of 2020, before the Dressing Room even existed. (We were just learning how to make PDFs, and I accidentally called it “Greek Goddess,” so I did a bad little fix, but whatever—you can still download the recipe, below. )

Our Green Goddess Dip, which you can convert into a dressing.

Green Goddess

54.4KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I’ve been on a miso kick lately—I’m realizing what everyone else has clearly known for centuries, which is that it tastes great with just about everything, including pineapple, which we proved below:

And in my ongoing quest to find bottled dressings to recommend (so that people won’t think I’m one of those do-it-yourself snobs who judges others for not cutting down their own trees and building their own house with them), I was thrilled to find a carrot one and a miso carrot one by two companies I like.

Unfortunately, both tasted like carrot cake made with no carrots. All I could taste was sugar.

So I got to work on the Carrot Miso Dressing I have for you today; I first made it with straight up carrot juice, but I couldn’t get the dressing to taste much like carrot, which is a quiet but very distinctive vegetable. So I reduced some carrot juice and that has made all the difference.

Hope you like it.

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FIRST, ONE SMALL REQUEST

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*RECIPE: Big-Flavored Carrot Miso Dressing 🥕

Makes about 1½ cups

• 1 cup carrot juice (I used Trader Joe’s Organic; Lakewood Organic is also good)

• 1 tablespoon plus two teaspoons white miso

• 1 garlic clove, cut up

• 2 tablespoons Champagne vinegar

• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

• 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons honey

• 2 teaspoons Sriracha, more to taste

• ½ cup extra virgin olive oil

• Freshly ground black pepper

1. In a small saucepan, bring the carrot juice to a boil then lower the heat to a simmer, continuing to cook until juice is reduced to ½ cup. Let this cool completely.

2. In a mini food processor, combine the reduced carrot juice, miso, garlic, vinegar, lemon juice, honey, and Sriracha and puree until smooth. Gradually stream in the olive oil, to blend completely and emulsify. Season with freshly ground black pepper. Taste; you might want to stream in a bit more olive oil to mellow it out or give it more kick with a little extra Sriracha.

   NOTE: This is better after a night of melding in the fridge, where it will keep in a sealed container for up to a week. (Let it sit for a few minutes at room temperature and give it a vigorous stir before serving; it solidifies and separates just a bit.)

Big Flavored Carrot Miso Dressing

456KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

🥬 🥬🥬 That’s It! We’re done here! We’ll see you soon with SALADS!

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