A Taste Of Asia

Asian style salad dressing

Summer is approaching and with this an increase in the number of salads consumed throughout the UK and Ireland. I have been working with our ingredients to create a full flavour, healthy dressing which would accompany any salad. Below is the recipe and step by step guide to how to create this fantastic dressing.

Recipes

AQ Plus Citrus Fibre N 15g

Water 775g

Sesame oil 100g

White wine vinegar 40g

Garlic puree 12g

White Miso paste 35g

Shio Koji 23g

Firstly we need to create a Citrus Fibre Suspension, this is done with high shear, the higher the better! In this case I used a Thermomix on level 10 for 1 minute.

You can see from the above images the impact shear has on on Citrus Fibre and its retention capability. The texture resembles that of wallpaper paste.

Citrus fibre has the capability to retain up to 50g water per 1g fibre if processed under the right conditions. This has multiple functions and benefits such as:

  • Fat reduction

  • Salt/Sugar reduction

  • Emulsification (the process in which we are using today)

  • Able to replace starch and gums, increasing flavour by not clagging taste buds

The next step is to create the emulsion, set the thermo mix onto setting 6 and slowly pour in the oil. This is the base for our dressing.

The final step is to add the flavour, I have used our white miso powder, white wine vinegar, garlic puree and our liquid shio koji. Add all of these in and mix in.

The use of miso and shio koji is what really brings this dressing to life, both are Japanese fermented ingredients which gives us the Asian flavours.

Shio and Miso are both high in glutamic acid, which we commonly know as Umami. Umami tricks our taste buds into thinking salt is present, and also gives a real depth of flavour of its own and lifts the flavours currently present in the recipe.

The final result is a full flavour Asian inspired salad dressing, which is low in fat and contains no free salt.

This dressing would accompany a nice mixed leaf salad with either chargrilled chicken, flaked salmon or some grilled halloumi