Raw Vegan Japanese Onion Dressing

One of the easiest ways to incorporate raw food into your diet besides smoothies and juices, are salads! Tasty dressings are essential in making it part of your daily eating habit, especially for those who aren’t necessarily used to healthy eating. Also, there are not many Asian style dressings floating around the raw food universe. So I’d like to share with you my raw vegan Japanese onion dressing. This onion dressing is a raw version of a popular Japanese dressing flavor. If you go to the salad dressing isle in Japan or in a Japanese market here, you’ll see onion dressings from several companies. It’s definitely one of the staple dressing of Japanese food, and one of my favorite. You might have even had something similar in your neighborhood Japanese restaurants. Though this is a very tasty dressing, I just want to warn you that if you are not a fan of onions, this dressing is not for you. But if you like onions like me, then do try! You might think, “But if it’s raw, isn’t it going to be too spicy?”. No, I take an extra step to get much of the spiciness out of the onions, so that it’s a mellow onion-y dressing.

Before we start, I’d like to go over some of the ingredients in this recipe. For the acid in the dressing, I use the raw coconut vinegar. There’s 2 raw vinegars you can use in raw foods, one is unpasteurized apple cider vinegar (I use the one from Bragg’s), and the other is raw coconut vinegar. Coconut vinegar is a mild vinegar similar to rice wine vinegar, so it’s great for creating Asian raw food recipes.

I also use soy sauce in this recipe. You can use either Nama Shoyu, which is a raw soy sauce that does contain gluten, or gluten-free Tamari, if you want to go gluten-free. Though Tamari is not raw, a lot of people choose Tamari over Nama Shoyu to opt out on the gluten. I, myself use reduced sodium gluten-free Tamari over Nama shoyu.

Another alternative is using soy-free soy sauce alternative, coconut aminos, which is raw, but it doesn’t taste like soy sauce. I’m Japanese so I was eating soy sauce since I was in the womb. To me it tastes like a watered down soy sauce. So I only like using it on certain recipes, where it’s used as a background flavor. In this recipe, since I do want the soy sauce flavor, I prefer using Tamari.

Now let’s get started. I use purple onion in this recipe, since they are milder and less spicy eaten raw. To take out the spiciness of the onion, thinly slice it and put it in a bowl. Add salt and massage the onion until it wilts, and let it sit for 15 minutes.

Then rinse really well under water until the sliminess of the onion is reduced, and firmly ring out the water. Take out a little bit of the sliced onion, chop it up fine and set it aside. We’ll put this in the dressing later, so there are tiny bits of onion in the dressing.

Add the remaining sliced onions, Tamari, maple syrup, coconut vinegar, and olive oil in the blender and blend until smooth. Add in the chopped up onion bits and run the blender on the lowest setting for only a few seconds, until mixed. Pour it over a salad and enjoy! If you have a dehydrator, you can make raw fried onions by tossing thinly sliced onions with olive oil and tamari, and dehydrating them on 115° until crispy. They make great salad toppers.

There you have it! Hope you love this dressing as much as I do! It’s definitely my go to dressing, when I want some yummy Asian salad. I’ll be sharing more dressing recipes in the upcoming posts. Happy salad eating!

5.0 from 1 reviews

Japanese Onion Dressing

 

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Cook time

25 mins

Total time

25 mins

 

Author: Mariko Sakata

Cuisine: raw food, raw vegan, gluten-free

Serves: 3-4

Ingredients

• ½ of purple onion
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1½ - 2 Tablespoons gluten-free tamari or nama shoyu (raw soy sauce)
• 1 Tablespoon maple syrup
• 1½ Tablespoons coconut vinegar
• 1 Tablespoon olive oil

Instructions

1. Thinly slice the onion, and place it in a bowl. Add the salt and massage the onion until it's wilted. Let it sit for 15 minutes.
2. Place the onions in a sieve and rinse well under water until the sliminess of the onions is reduced. Firmly ring it out.
3. Take out a small amount of onion and chop finely, and set aside.
4. Put the remaining sliced onion, Tamari, maple syrup, coconut vinegar, and olive oil into the blender, blend until smooth.
5. Add in the finely chopped onion, and run the blender on lowest speed for a few seconds, until it's mixed well.
6. Serve over salad.

Notes

The flavor intensity and the amount of salt in the soy sauce can vary depending on the brand, or the kind of soy sauce you are using. Adjust the soy sauce amount to taste.

Store it in a air tight container. It keeps in the refrigerator for 3 days.

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