Summer cooking to me is all about grilling and making (relatively) light meal, and hopefully requiring less cooking time in the kitchen. Grill some delicious steak, pick up fresh greens and summer vegetables from your garden, and make this hearty and delicious salad with homemade Japanese style dressing!
Watch How To Make Steak Salad with Shoyu Dressing
Click here to watch on YouTube
What You Need for Steak Salad
1. Juicy Steak
Depends on your preference and whether you’re making this dish as a side or main course, choose the cut of steak that works for you. I used ribeye because I wanted this dish to be the main meal and have plenty of protein with the salad. If you’re having a party and making a huge batch of this dish, flank steak cut into small slices can be a good alternative. You just need a few slices of steak for each serving. I sear the steak on my cast iron grill pan to make a nice grill mark on the steak and cooked till medium rare. Wait until the pan is really hot before cooking the steak.
2. Green Salad
I found this salad mix called “Organic Asian Greens” with baby spinach, pak-choi, mizuna, komatsuna, baby kale, baby chard, baby tatsoi, baby mustard, and baby collard. I think this blend goes well with my shoyu based Japanese salad dressing, but feel free to use whatever green salad you enjoy. Green leaf lettuce, red leaf lettuce, butter lettuce, romaine lettuce, and most kinds of salad mix would work.
3. Colorful Vegetables
Besides the greens and steak, you can make this dish more appetizing and “special” by adding colorful ingredients. For this salad, I chose to use heirloom tomatoes, cucumber, watermelon radish, red radish, and avocado to add in additional colors. Look at the salad and imagine if I had only plated green salad with the steak on top. It’s won’t be as appetizing as the current picture, right? Playing with colors is a super easy trick to make a boring looking dish into a pretty and tasty one.
4. Shoyu Dressing
Shoyu (醤油) means soy sauce the in Japanese language. In recent years, I started to see more “shoyu” on the menu at fine dining restaurants. I am not sure why the chefs decided to use “shoyu” instead of “soy sauce” but it seems that more people are now aware of this word. So let’s call today’s soy sauce base dressing shoyu dressing to make it a bit more fancy. The dressing itself is a variation of Japanese-style wafu dressing, which is really easy to make with typical Japanese pantry ingredients. It’s made of rice vinegar, soy sauce, oil, mirin, sugar, sesame seeds, and lemon juice.
Gluten Free Soy Sauce
Soy sauce is traditionally brewed from water, wheat, soybeans and salt. Many gluten intolerant JOC readers have told me that they can’t eat Japanese food at restaurants because they won’t be able to eat food made with regular soy sauce, unless it’s 100% wheat-free tamari soy sauce or gluten-free soy sauce.
I’ve been partnering with Kikkoman to create delicious gluten-free Japanese recipes with their gluten-free soy sauce so that everyone can enjoy Japanese foods. For this recipe, I used the regular gluten-free soy sauce (blue label) which tastes just like regular soy sauce! If you’re gluten intolerant, check out my Gluten Free Recipes for additional recipe ideas.
I hope this Japanese-style salad will be a great main or side dish to serve at your next get together with family and friends! Don’t want to miss a recipe? Sign up for the FREE Just One Cookbook newsletter delivered to your inbox! And stay in touch on Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram for all the latest updates.
Full Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Kikkoman USA. Thoughts and opinions stated are my own.
