Just over two months ago, I hinted that I'd be blogging this recipe for my favorite salad dressing. (I was pretty obvious.) Favorite salad dressing, you say? Salad dressings aren't usually the kind of thing people tend to talk about with the same reverence as, say, a good brownie recipe or anything involving cheese. (Or is that just my group of friends?)
Until they've tasted this dressing.
It's that good.
I seriously love this stuff. I went on and on about it in my previous post, but I'll just reiterate here how amazingly delicious this stuff is. You know how when you bake a cake or cookies or brownies you maybe lick all the batter or dough off the spoons and bowls even though you know you shouldn't because of the raw eggs and stuff? I do the same with this dressing. I'm not even kidding.
(As a side note, when I was a little kid I always thought you weren't supposed to eat the raw batter because of the baking soda. I thought it was something like how your stomach is acidic, so don't eat raw baking soda...like how vinegar and baking soda react? I thought you'd have a volcano in your tummy. Yeah. Kid logic!)
Anyway...dressing! I was first introduced to a version of this dressing at Mother's in Austin. I tried the house dressing on a whim, I hadn't actually heard anything about it, and it was delicious! It may have been the first restaurant salad I had ever completely devoured. This is the only salad dressing I have ever craved. I tried to find a way to buy it when I moved away, but alas, none was found. I googled and googled but had trouble finding anything I could definitively identify as that dressing. So I gave up on it for a while. Another google search after many months finally resulted in finding that there are actually a few different semi-well-known "cashew tamari" dressings. But oh how different they were! I found a few recipes that sounded like what I wanted and ended up with this one.
Give it a try. You won't regret it!
Our humble ingredients...
cashew tamari dressing
adapted from somewhere though I can't at this point remember where
- 1/4 cup vegetable oil
- 1/4 cup unsalted cashews
- 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
- 3 tablespoons tamari
Combine all ingredients in a blender or in a cup for an immersion blender. Blend until emulsified but don't make cashew butter out of it! It will only take a few seconds. There should still be bits of cashew visible. Drizzle over salad. Enjoy.
You can adjust the amount of tamari to change the level of saltiness. I like things pretty salty. You may need less! Another note on salt - do not use salted cashews. Not unless you REALLY LIKE SALT.
Mmm...tamari...
Note: I have an immersion blender that came with a cup that has measurements on it - makes measuring out the oil and cashews super easy! Just add the 1/4 cup oil first, then dump cashews in until the liquid rises to 1/2 cup.
Our humble ingredients...combined but not blended...
See the bits? You may like your bits larger! I wouldn't go any smaller or you'll have cashew butter. Though if that's how you like it...
Yum.
