[0:00]This is like truly the best recipe. That was why I was like, do not make this video without this. It's the best recipe in my whole book. It's so good.
[0:15]Welcome to Cooking 101. I'm Samin Nosrat, writer, teacher, cook. I am in New York City at the New York Times Cooking Studio Kitchen. Today I'm going to teach you all about salad dressings.
[0:30]My family's from Iran. My mom always made the delicious Shirazi salad, like a tomato, cucumber, onion number. But that's not sort of what we think of as salad here in this country. The only other salad my mom would make, bless her, she's a great cook, was romaine hearts, pecorino cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, it was the '90s, and a very, very lemony dressing, that was so lemony. She has the most acidic palette. This is not like what a seven-year-old wants to eat. I thought I hated salad until I started working in restaurants as a cook. And the first restaurant where I worked is Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, which I think of as a temple to salad. And kind of blew my mind to see all of the things they consider salad. Roasted beets drizzled with crème fraîche. Sliced tomatoes and avocado, that's a salad. Roasted vegetables drizzled with a creamy dressing. Things were so much more than just some lettuce leaves and sort of oil and vinegar. Now I don't work in restaurants anymore. I'm just a regular person at home, trying to eat as much salad in my life as possible for health and joy reasons. And I would like to help you make your own life better too. I wrote a cookbook. It's called Good Things. It was not an easy book to write. In large part because it's a book of mostly recipes, and I hate writing recipes. And then one day I was making like a creamy sesame ginger dressing to make this slaw that I was trying to reverse engineer from this deli near my house. And I made it and it was so good, and I was just standing there thinking to myself, I was like, wow, this is so good. I wish I could share this with people. If only I had a convenient way to share the recipe for this dressing with people.
[2:10]You know, I I think of salad dressing as sort of the big umbrella term. There's the oil and vinegar vinaigrettes, and then there's sort of thicker emulsified creamy dressings. A vinaigrette is like the word comes from French and it's just means like a vinegar-based dressing. It's pretty simple. Here's a vinaigrette, pretty much ready to go. This is just one part vinegar, two parts oil. Oh, another thing that's a vinaigrette. Haha. I will never forgive you if you cut this out of the video. So, this is a scarab pendant. It's a scarab beetle. I bought it because scarabs represent transformation and rebirth. I also bought it because when the vintage jewelry person sent the listing to me, she said, this is not a pendant, it's a vinaigrette. And I was like, what? Exquisima? Exquisima? It's not a locket exactly, but there's like a little beautiful sort of gilded cage in here, and it's open, and in Victorian times, people were kind of smelly, so like a refined elegant woman would take a little piece of cotton and soak it in a perfume or an essential oil and put it in here, and then you'd have this like good smelling thing called a vinaigrette, and it would make your day smell a lot nicer. This is just one of the coolest facts I ever learned.
[3:25]At its heart, the most simple version of a vinaigrette is oil, vinegar, and a little bit of seasoning. I think it helps to have a tiny secret amount of sweetness in there, and I know I'm not the only one, which is why balsamic vinaigrette is a classic favorite. Before we go into the first recipe, I'm just going to show you the most simple, most basic version of a vinaigrette. To get that salty and sweet and acid in one ingredient, seasoned rice vinegar. And then some delicious olive oil. So, really it's a two-ingredient vinaigrette that we may need to balance with a little extra salt. The ratio, this is not the most acidic of vinegars, but in general, it's like a two to one, sometimes it ends up being maybe three to one depending on how how tangy we want to go for our lettuce. You really want to whisk it up. Whisk it up. If you're just stirring in a circle horizontally, the stuff that's on top is not going to mix with the stuff that's on bottom. So you really have to stir at an angle, hence the whisk in this jar, or even better, do this. And then we can taste. See how it already looks cloudy, that's because it's they've combined temporarily to become a suspension. Honestly, that tastes pretty good to me, but if it needed a little more something, I could now adjust it in the jar. I made everyone look for the teeniest tiniest ladle when you mix with your ladle. This is so silly. When you mix with your ladle, or your whisk, or your spoon, or whatever it is that you're going to pull, make sure you mix whisk at an like a diagonal angle, like this, rather than like this, so that you're combining, right, the lower density oil and the higher density vinegar. Does that make sense?
[5:23]This one comes from Via Carota, one of my favorite restaurants in New York City. I wrote about it for the New York Times Magazine, and it went viral as the best salad dressing in the world. Honestly, it's the only one my friends and I, my cook friends and I make to the point where now we just refer to it as house dressing. Even kids, like salad-averse kids are always like, man, I love Samin's salad dressing. It starts with a shallot. Shallots are so great in dressing, they add that crunch, but you do have to sort of take care. If you just add shallot directly into a dressing without doing a little bit of prep, you're going to end up with fire mouth. So now we have all this shallot, and you're just going to want to rinse it off with some cold water. That's going to get that initial onion fire off of there. Another way, a different kind of recipe is to just place your shallot in a bowl and coat it with some acid, whether it's lemon or vinegar, that's called macerating. If you let a shallot macerate like that for 10 or 15 minutes and then build your dressing on top of that, that will have like softened that fire. And then the secret ingredient in this salad dressing at Via Carota is so strange, it's warm water. I had never really added water to a vinaigrette before and I when I asked them why they did it, they said it's because it sort of softens and smooths out the whole dressing. And I don't understand it, but I abide by it. I always do it now and it really does make a little difference. So if you just add your water and some aged sherry vinegar here. I will say this is one of those ingredients, it's worth buying a good bottle, you know, nicer than maybe like the grocery store brand, cuz that like classic aging that happens often in a place where sherry, you know, has been made for centuries. It really does produce a very delicious, mild, well-rounded vinegar, like let me taste this one. This one itself even has almost like a little bit of a sweet edge. It doesn't feel like it's cutting you in the back of the throat. Because vinaigrette and salad dressing is in general like not the most complicated cooking, doesn't have a lot of fancy heating techniques to obscure flavors. It is worth it to start with very good tasting ingredients. One of the other little quirks of this recipe is that they use two kinds of mustard. So this is whole grain and fine Dijon. This mustard is going to help this dressing emulsify. It won't be a super long-lasting emulsion. An emulsion is a peace treaty between two natural enemies, oil and vinegar. They don't like each other naturally, which is why they separate like this is starting to do. So an emulsion is the act of binding them together into a creamy third state. And there are a lot of tools that are very delicious and helpful that are emulsifiers that help hold that emulsion in place. Mustard is a great emulsifier. So sometimes I'll add mustard to a dressing just a little bit, even if I don't want mustard taste, just because I want mustard emulsifying help. And see when I do this, nothing's happening because I'm just stirring the stuff around. So you really got to go like this, to get your whisk or your ladle or whatever in there and bring the stuff that's on the bottom up to the top.
[8:33]This dressing is so good because it does exactly what you want a salad dressing to do. It coats the lettuce beautifully, and it has this like a little perk of acid that makes you be like, and you know, acid makes your mouth water. And so you're kind of like, I want more, I want more. And so truly it's just like a, I want more feeling. And so when my mouth wants more, I know I'm good. Okay. Let's build a salad. Today we're really lucky, we're starting with beautiful, fresh from the farmer's market, heads of baby lettuces. Full disclosure, this is not how I always start salad at home. I often use bagged romaine hearts. I always am thinking about the size of the lettuce or the size of whatever it is that I'm going to eat. I want to have a multitude of crunches. I want to have every bite to have multiple sort of different kinds of offerings. We have some beautiful shaved watermelon radishes. They're so gorgeous. I mean, I feel like these are nature's like watercolor painting. And then at the end we'll fold in some whole leaves of herbs. I love a little secret herb bite. This is kosher salt, my favorite. This is nice and light and flaky and it's going to dissolve once you put your dressing in. And then it's always better to under-dress than to over-dress. I am a notorious over-dresser. Let's see what happened. Okay. But you can always fix it, you can always add a little more lettuce. One thing I am like fanatical about is tongs. I do not believe in tongs for dressing a salad. I believe in using your hands and making sure everything is coated. I'm going in, I'm being thorough, but I'm not compressing. This is not a massage situation. This is a delicate lifting situation.
[10:11]Let's wait. We lift and we pile.
[10:20]And if you want to be really chef fancy, take a little bit extra special things. Season it, dress it, and then I put them on top.
[10:32]Chef drizzle.
[10:41]This is a sesame gingery miso dressing. This is the reason I wrote the book that I just wrote. This one I think of is a nice introductory creamy dressing because it doesn't involve really any skill. It just involves my new favorite kitchen tool of all time, the immersion blender, which I think of as an emulsion machine. Since the immersion blender is so powerful and so wonderful, you don't have to do a ton of prep with these ingredients, but you do have to slice it a little bit. The thing I like about this dressing, I've sort of pushed every element of sesame, of ginger, of acid to the very edge. So it can hold up to a slaw that sits over the course of a few days. So this is white miso paste, which is kind of the mildest and sweetest of the miso pastes. Honey, quite a lot of lemon juice, a seasoned rice vinegar, which again, has a little sugar and salt in it. And this is the toasted sesame oil to add the sesame flavor. I'm going to see if I can do a little preliminary juicing. And then you're just going to drizzle or I will, we both will together, drizzle the oil in very slowly while blending. When I use an immersion blender, I will say, I do like to work in a taller and narrower container, rather than a wider bowl because it's a way to guarantee that this little blade comes into contact with everything that it needs to come in contact with, and actually blends it and smooths it and breaks it down. Taste quite delicious. I actually think it can use a little more salt. This will eventually separate because there's not an amazing amount of emulsifiers in there holding it together. But the beauty of the immersion blender is like even though this is enough dressing for several days or several salads, when you bring it back out of the fridge, you just it again and it'll come right back together. We have our creamy sesame ginger dressing. We're going to use it to make a delicious super simple slaw. The thing I love about this slaw is it's good now, and it'll be good tomorrow, and it'll be good the next day too. So, honestly, if you're at my house, it might still be good in five days, but I'm not going to tell you to do that. And I also love salted roasted peanuts, which you can either chop or leave whole. I will say peanuts do a funny thing, they kind of absorb the dressing and turn this funny color and texture. If you're not going to serve this right away, add them at the last second. But we're going to eat this right now, so...
[13:08]And again, no tongs. Please use your hands. I know it seems counterintuitive, but I almost feel like things should inch toward the over-dressed. Part of what you're expecting when you're eating something dressed with a creamy dressing is that creaminess. And so if it's under-dressed, it's really disappointing. But still, you'll see this is not like, it's not swimming, it's just all going to be coated. Oh my God. Honestly, because this dressing is so highly seasoned and like I said, I took everything to the edge. It's actually already perfect, which never happens.
[13:49]No shade to all my other dressings. This is my favorite dressing. It was inspired by a little restaurant in LA that I I'm obsessed with called Kismet Rotisserie, and they have this lemon poppy seed dressing. And I begged them for the recipe and they wouldn't give it to me because they were writing their own cookbook, which they did, and you should go buy it. So I had to reverse engineer it for myself, and somehow I ended up with this, which is not exactly the same, but it's become indispensable in my kitchen, and every single person I've shared it with has it at all times at their house. And it's so good.
[14:27]We're going to start by making an Aquafaba mayonnaise or some people call it a Fabba mayonnaise. Aquafaba is just Latin term and it just means bean water, literally just the bean cooking liquid from any pot of beans. I have found that chickpea cooking liquid is my favorite aquafaba for salad dressings. It's kind of the most neutral in flavor and in color. What you're going for is the consistency kind of of like an egg white. It should be almost like snotty. So if the aquafaba in whatever can of chickpeas you opened or the chickpeas you just cooked is runnier than that, then you can just reduce it on the stove for a few minutes until it thickens to that consistency, let it cool to room temperature, and then use it. This is basically acting like an egg in a mayonnaise is going to act. Mustard, as I said earlier, is an emulsifier, so it's going to help this aquafaba mayonnaise come together. This is just a portion, it's one tablespoon of the total amount of vinegar that's apple cider vinegar that's in this. All right, so I'm I'm like a little bit off the bottom and I'm at an angle, and now I'm just going to drizzle this oil in drop by drop. And what's the reason for going so slow? I don't know. It's science. Like a, there's only so much something to cling to something else in there. And if you go too fast, it can't handle it and it breaks and it turns into like an icko mess. You can already see it's starting to get thick and creamy, which is nice.
[15:59]Oh yeah, it's happening, guys. It's happening. Can you see it? Does it look creamy? Okay, I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you how creamy it just got. I was really worried. I thought I was going to make a fool of myself on the Internet again. It's that creamy. It has like that stiff of a peak. It is really magical. So this we can set aside for a moment, and then we'll just get everything else into here and turn it into a smooth mixture and then sort of mount it into the fabanese base. Apple cider vinegar, granulated sugar, instead of a wet sugar, maple syrup or honey, that would make it more liquidy and more runny. And I'm trying to keep this as thick and creamy as possible. Freshly squeezed lemon juice, now my secret ingredients. Onion powder, celery seed, miso paste. I feel like every recipe in this book, I'm like, look, I'll just add an entire lemon's zest. Maybe one lemon or maybe honestly, I feel like you can't put too much, so I'm going to put a little extra. And then some garlic.
[17:15]This is an emulsion at its finest. This is like, this is return to the '90s salad bar. Oh my God.
[17:26]I think there's something really nostalgic about this dressing. Can you guys just come taste it so you can give me some words because it's so fun. It's just it tastes like a like a very good version of like your childhood store-bought something. This dressing is truly so all purpose and delicious that you can put it on everything, including turning something as simple as roasted vegetables into a elevated side dish. I like taking broccoli really nice and dark and getting all of this caramelization, and I don't know why I started doing this, but I thought it would be nice to massage lemon zest into my broccoli when it still warms.
[18:35]I hope that you can see that it's so simple to make a salad dressing. We started with sort of our most simple version of a vinaigrette. Once we got a little bit more advanced, and we started adding mustard and other emulsifiers, the dressings stay sort of in that creamy state a little bit longer. Hopefully this is sort of giving you the courage and bravery and tools you need to start making your own dressing and have it at home so that you can really start expanding your idea of what a salad is and can be. Find these recipes at the link below at New York timescooking.com, or in my book, good things. Good? No. Happy solid to you.
