Japanese Wafu Dressing Recipe

Japanese wafu dressing with onions to serve with your salad, fish or steak.

Jump to:

• 📕 What is it?
• 🧅 Ingredients
• 🔪 How to make it?
• 🍴 Serving
• 🍱 Storing
• 💭 FAQs
• 📖 Recipe

📕 What is it?

Wa-fu means Japanese dressing and is a common vinaigrette-like sauce in Japan.

People usually buy it ready-made in stores in Japan but it can also made from scratch at home because it includes common pantry ingredients.

This particular wafu dressing was my food experts', Momokos', recommendation, as it includes onions.

It's one of many wafu dressing variations enjoyed all over Japan.

🧅 Ingredients

The base ingredients for a wafu dressings include soy sauce, sesame (called goma), and vinegar.

Yet, this particular wafu dressing includes some more ingredients to bring out all the flavors besides salty and umami.

• soy sauce - kikkoman basic soy sauce
• onion - white onion or purple or bulbs of green onions.
• vinegar - as in rice vinegar or distilled vinegar
• sesame oil - or olive oil as alternative
• mirin - which is a sweet sake (japanese alcohol) and sugar mixture. We create a mirin variation by combining vodka and sugar
• lime juice - you can use lemonn or yuzu too

🔪 How to make it?

Here is an overview on how to make this from scratch. The US and metric measurements are in the recipe card further below.

Step 1

Dice and mince onion.

Heat up vodka with brown sugar and cook onion in that until completely reduced.

Step 2

Combine soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, lime juice and onion.

Step 3

Pour wafu dressing into a small bottle, close, and shake it.

Use as per your needs or store.

🍴 Serving

I love it simple with a plain chopped napa cabbage salad (switch the dressing in my Japanese salad).

Yet, the dressing is quite versatile and can be used on other things but raw vegetables.

You can serve it up with a cooked fish dish or your favorite steak.

Just think how you would use a french dressing and you can pretty much use this dressing the same way.

For example, I like to drop some dressing into an avocado half. It's a healthy and delicious appetizer!

🍱 Storing

I like to prepare the wafu dressing in a simple small glass bottle, like the one in the picture and video, because that way I just need to close the lid and shake it.

The dressing can be easily stored in the fridge and you just need to shake it in the bottle before using it over your food.

It's that simple!

That way your Japanese soy sauce dressing will be good for at least 10 days, cooled in the fridge.

💭 FAQs

📖 Recipe