Anyone who hosts regularly knows the power, the necessity, of a house specialty. Many of my friends traffic in the house dessert or drink: At one apartment, you can expect to end a meal with a platter of cherries or other ruby fruit, shards of dark chocolate and little disks of shortbread or other cookie. At another, you’ll be greeted by some elusive specialty amaro and soda.
At my own, there is a house salad. I love to serve a pile of sliced Persian cucumbers and celery tangled in arugula, dressed in a mixture of mashed avocado, sesame oil and lime juice. Sometimes I add thinly sliced snap peas! Other times there are scallions. Many more times, there is cilantro. Catch me adding the occasional splash of ponzu.
(I can take no credit for it: It’s one of my colleague Becky Hughes’s house salads, on perpetual loan to me.)
Samin Nosrat, too, knows how one person’s house specialty can quickly become your own. Her house dressing is actually that of Via Carota, the beloved Italian restaurant in the West Village. “Since I first wrote about this recipe,” she writes, “it’s become indispensable not only for me but also for my entire Culinary Brain Trust, who now simply call it House Dressing.”
Think of today’s newsletter, then, as your own Culinary Brain Trust, a sauce library from which to borrow your next house dressing. Samin has a few more suggestions for you. Her creamy lemon-miso dressing — perhaps her new favorite all-purpose dressing, she writes in the recipe — is inspired by another restaurant, Kismet Rotisserie in Los Angeles. It checks all the boxes: creamy, tangy, sweet, savory, good on salad, good on everything else, especially roasted broccoli.
Creamy Lemon-Miso Dressing
It is also, perhaps surprisingly, vegan, and the stroke of genius comes in its use of aquafaba, the liquid found in a can of chickpeas. The base of the dressing is a quick aquafaba-based mayonnaise that comes together by whipping the liquid with mustard, vinegar and oil. Samin then fortifies it with lemon, miso, garlic, onion powder and celery seed.
More miso, more genius: Yewande Komolafe’s creamy avocado-miso dressing combines two of my favorite ingredients for something that is “as easy as it is brilliant,” one reader wrote in the recipe comments. “A perfectly silky, unctuous, umami-filled dressing that would also make a great dip with raw veg.” Heard!
And since I’ve got tamarind on the mind, I’ve been eying Ifrah F. Ahmed’s little gem salad with tamarind dressing. The dressing’s sour edge is softened by a little maple syrup and a medjool date, which I always have on hand for my latest house dessert. (Dates with a little softened salted butter, dark chocolate chips and more salt. Trust me on this.)
But maybe the feta dressing in Sue Li’s grilled corn and avocado salad is more your speed, or the jalapeño-ranch dressing in Alexa Weibel’s chopped salad, or the carrot-ginger dressing Eric Kim loves with crunchy greens.
Maybe your house dressing is actually Dan Pelosi’s honey mustard. Or Lidey Heuck’s balsamic vinaigrette. Or Kenji López-Alt’s miso-sesame vinaigrette that’s good on anything.
But I think Samin’s creamy sesame-ginger dressing is the true front-runner for unseating my current house dressing. It’s everything I like: puckery with rice vinegar, salty with miso, sweet with honey, nutty with sesame oil, pungent with ginger, spicy with jalapeño. I bet it’d be exceptional over cucumbers, celery and arugula.
Grilled Corn and Avocado Salad With Feta Dressing
Crunchy Greens With Carrot-Ginger Dressing
Creamy Sesame-Ginger Dressing
One More Thing!
Regular Veggie readers will know that I get a lot of reader questions, and, boy, do I love answering them. So much so that we’ve been looking to get you those answers in more places than just this newsletter. Watch this space: Next week, I’ll have a new way to tackle your most pressing vegetable requests.
OK, two spaces to watch: I’ll be on the Wirecutter Show tomorrow talking all things beach food. Voice reveal! Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app to ensure you don’t miss the episode when it drops Friday.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
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Tanya Sichynsky is an editor for the Food and Cooking sections of The Times and the author of The Veggie, a weekly vegetarian newsletter.
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