January 16, 2016
I have a few short recipe posts in the bullpen I’ll be posting over the next week or two.
Last week I made mushroom risotto that called for miso paste. I found myself with some left over miso and wondered what to do with it. Miso soup came to mind but then I’d have to make another trip to the grocery store and end up with more leftover bits to use. Then it struck me: one of my favorites salad dressings comes from our local sushi restaurant. I figured it must use miso paste so I looked around to try to find something. I got a starting point from the Savory Sweet Life blog.
Not a lot of ingredients:
The recipe calls for honey, sugar, or agave syrup as the sweetener. I used honey because we are trying to eat less refined sugar. There are options for the oil: grapeseed, canola, or olive oil. EVO is our go-to so I used that.
While I used the same ingredients as the original recipe I made some adjustments to the process. Where the original recipe calls for tossing everything in the food processor and whirling everything together at once, I took a more layered approach.
I tossed the peeled and crushed garlic cloves and the peeled and sliced ginger into the food processor by themselves and pulsed until they were pretty well ground up. Then I added the other ingredients except for the olive oil and whirled it up thoroughly. Finally I drizzled the olive oil through the feed tube with the food processor running. I let it go until the mixture was emulsified.
Then I transferred the dressing to our handy dandy magic salad dressing bottle.
Dinner was served – we had it with the leftover mushroom risotto. You can find my copy with my process changes here.
Rating: ★★★
This recipe had a high bar to clear to match the dressing at our favorite Japanese restaurant. Perhaps sugar instead of honey and a different oil would have made the difference. This is certainly good enough to make again but I think I’ll play around a bit more.
