Almost every American supermarket now carries a bottle of Japanese sesame dressing — creamy, nutty, faintly sweet, and familiar even to people who have never seen how it begins. It begins as seeds. A handful of toasted sesame, crushed in a ridged clay bowl, then mayonnaise, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, and oil stirred into the same bowl.
Visitors from overseas cook with us, and sesame dressing is one of the things they go looking for in Japanese supermarkets. So rather than buy a bottle, we sometimes make it together. Grinding the sesame takes only a couple of minutes, and the smell that comes up is not dramatic — it is quiet and warm, the smell of something freshly toasted — but it is enough to tell you that the bowl is not what it was a minute ago. Once you have made it, it stops being a bottle you look for and becomes something you can put together from what you keep at home.
Serves 4 · about 10 minutes
Ingredients
- 4 Tbsp toasted white sesame seeds
- 4 Tbsp Japanese mayonnaise
- 1 Tbsp soy sauce
- ½ Tbsp rice vinegar
- 1 tsp sugar
- 1 Tbsp neutral oil, or olive oil
- To serve: crisp lettuce, cucumber, tomato — or blanched broccoli and green beans
How to make it
- Grind the sesame seeds. In Japan this is traditionally done in a suribachi, a clay bowl lined with fine ridges, but you do not need one. A mortar and pestle works, and if you have neither, a small blender will do it. You can also put the toasted seeds in a sturdy plastic bag and crush them with a rolling pin or the base of a glass. If your shop sells sesame already ground (surigoma), start there and skip this step. Stop before everything becomes a powder. You want finely ground sesame with small broken pieces still in it: the fine sesame makes the dressing creamy, the coarser pieces give it something to chew.
- Add the mayonnaise, soy sauce, vinegar, and sugar straight into the same bowl and stir until smooth.
- Pour in the oil last, in a thin stream, stirring as you go. The dressing loosens slightly and turns a shade paler.
- Taste. Add a spoonful of water if you want it to pour rather than spoon. Serve over cold, crisp vegetables.
Make it a noodle sauce
Thinned out, the same bowl becomes goma-dare — the sesame sauce Japan serves with cold noodles. Stir roughly 3 Tbsp of the dressing into 4 Tbsp of cold dashi: loose enough to coat a strand, thick enough to cling to it. Pour it into small cups and set them on the table. Boil soba or udon, rinse the noodles well under cold running water, drain them thoroughly, and dip them as you eat. Shredded nori and a few shiso leaves cut into ribbons belong here as much as the scallion — the seaweed against the sesame, the shiso cutting through it. That is dinner on one of the hottest nights of the year.
Tip
If grinding is not going to happen on a weeknight, sesame paste stands in beautifully — smoother, without the broken-seed texture, and the dressing comes together in a minute. To make it without egg, leave out the mayonnaise, use 2 Tbsp sesame paste in its place, and add a spoonful of water and a little extra vinegar to loosen it. The dressing keeps about three days in the refrigerator and thickens slightly as it sits. The same sesame base also becomes a dipping sauce for shabu-shabu, so it is worth making more than you need. And if you want the same sesame in a quieter form, blanched spinach folded through a thicker version of it is Spinach Goma-ae.
One of five in our No Stove collection — for the days too hot to cook.
