These easy Japanese salad dressings are what you need to upgrade your next salad! From carrot ginger dressing to classic Japanese wafu dressing, and no-fuss sesame dressing, they are bright, bold, and impressively versatile. Each recipe deserves to be known by heart!
Salad dressings are essential standbys for any home cooks. In the case of Japanese salads, it’s the dressings that define even the most ordinary combination of vegetables, proteins, seeds, and grains. We love them for all of these elements: salty against sweet, tanginess moderating the richness of oil, and unexpected spark from umami ingredients.
Here, we’ve put together 10 Easy Japanese Salad Dressings that we know you’ll fall in love with. Each offers endless possibilities and enhances salads, noodles, or rice bowls. Best of all, the ingredients are pantry staples, making these dressings surprisingly easy to prepare at home.
Memorize them, and you’ll always have a perfect accompaniment for your bento lunch box, wafu pasta, or late-night dinner!
10 Easy Japanese Salad Dressing Recipes
1. Wafu Dressing
Made with soy sauce, rice vinegar, roasted sesame seeds, and grated onion, this versatile wafu dressing pairs well with any salad combination you can think of. Use coconut amino or tamari for gluten-free substititutes. You’ll love how it delivers amazing flavors with subtlety. I enjoy it on a simple salad of romaine (or iceberg), cucumber, and radish topped with hard-boiled eggs.
2. Carrot Ginger Dressing
Wondering how to recreate the dressing served over a lettuce salad at your favorite sushi or hibachi restaurant? This Carrot-Ginger Dressing recipe is for you! It’s as easy as combining carrot, fresh ginger, miso, sesame oil, sugar, vinegar, and salt in a food processor or blender and blending until smooth.
The result? A salad dressing that tastes even better than what you get at Japanese restaurants!
3. Miso Dressing
Thanks to miso paste, the superstar condiment in Japanese cuisine, this miso dressing is guaranteed to enliven any salad with its umami complexity. It also pairs beautifully as a sauce tossed with your noodle salad!
4. Sesame Dressing
Good Japanese dressing is all about the balancing act. For this homemade sesame dressing, you can easily achieve that by adjusting the ingredients to suit your palate. If you prefer a more tangy taste, use more rice wine vinegar. If you prefer a creamier texture, add in a bit more mayo.
5. Sesame Ponzu Dressing
Ponzu is a citrus-based soy sauce packed with umami. You can use the ready-made bottle or make your own ponzu sauce at home. Full of flavor yet incredibly refreshing, this sesame ponzu dressing is something you wouldn’t want to miss out on! It’s not only amazing as a salad dressing but also as a great sauce for tossing with soba noodles, tofu, or meatballs.
6. Ponzu Mayonnaise Dressing
Ponzu and Japanese mayonnaise make the perfect blend for a creamy salad dressing. It’s especially delicious in Japanese kani salad (crab salad), but you can certainly use this dressing with any other salad combination.
7–10. 4 Basic Japanese Salad Dressings
These are the 4 super basic salad dressings you’ll encounter in Japan: Italian salad dressing, French salad dressing, shoyu (soy sauce) dressing, and chuka (Chinese-style) dressing. They require very basic ingredients from your pantry, such as good-quality olive oil (or vegetable oil or canola oil), vinegars, sugar, salt, and pepper. Feel free to amp them up by adding garlic or ginger as you see fit.
Each salad dressing takes only minutes to whisk together, and they store well in the fridge (mason jars are the best!) for at least a week. These are go-to recipes for Japanese home cooks.
Looking for Salad Recipes and Inspirations?
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Select the salad dressing recipes you want to make from the list above.
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Follow the detailed instruction in each post (tips and substitutions included).
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Make and enjoy the dressings! For easy storage, keep the dressing in a mason jar.
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Do you have a favorite? Share in the comment box below!
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