Try Korean cooking: Easy salad dressing/dipping sauce

Do you like Korean food? Want to try making some at home? It's much easier than you think.

I decided to post a very easy recipe for a sauce I use as salad dressing and a dipping sauce. It's a classic Korean sauce, with a salty, spicy, vinegary taste. It's so easy. If you can't make this then, seriously, (and I say this out of love) you should give up cooking.



Always lurking.

 This versatile sauce is used for many things in Korea. It can be a dipping sauce for pan fried foods, as a dressing for salad, as an accompaniment to rice, and it's also a sauce for one of my favourite side dishes, acorn jelly (I'll explain that one another time).

Continue to the recipe after the jump!






What do you need?

Before you start googling for the nearest Korean grocery shop, I chose this recipe first because you can make it without any special Korean ingredients and a lot of the ingredients are optional. The most important ones are the soy sauce and vinegar. Got those? Then you've got yourself a dipping sauce. Mixing about half soy and half vinegar is a basic sauce Koreans use to dip their dumplings in.

I don't usually measure my ingredients, I just make it  by tasting it as I go and experience. I checked online and  saw many variations of the ingredients and measurements for recipe. Some of them have sesame seeds and oil, some don't etc. Just go with what you have. My message is (and this goes for all cooking) It's really up to your own taste. If you don't like garlic, leave it out. If you like vinegar, add more. Just make it, try it and then add more of the flavours you like.

Let's do this.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons normal soy sauce.
1 tablespoon vinegar. (I'm using brown rice vinegar. Plain white vinegar, apple cider vinegar  or other sour vinegars are fine too. My husband made it with balsamic once  and thought it was awesome - I disagreed).
1 tablespoon finely chopped shallots/green onions/spring onions/scallions whatever you call them. In Korea they are called "pa" (much simpler!) and are used in everything.
1 teaspoon crushed garlic - leave it out if you don't like strong garlic flavour.
1 teaspoon chili pepper flakes - called "gotchu garu" in Korea. You can substitute a little chopped fresh chilli or chilli powder or just leave it out if you don't like spicy food.
1 teaspoon sesame oil - optional.
1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds - optional. Some recipes tell you to toast and crush them. I have pre-toasted ones and don't bother crushing them.
1/2-1 teaspoon sugar - I don't like it sweet, so I usually leave out the sugar but put some in and see if you like it. Put more in if you think it needs it.
Add water if it's too strong, especially if you are using it for salad dressing.

Dried chili flakes and toasted sesame seeds

Chopped pa

Now for the really tricky part. Put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix them together.

Finished!

Here I'm using the sauce in 3 ways:

 As a dressing on a salad.

Atonement for the cinnamon roll I ate earlier today.

As a sauce for steamed tofu

Put tofu into boiling water for 10 minutes and drain.

And as a dipping sauce for fried fish

I'll try licking my lips. Gah! Can't they take a hint?

Daddy, look into my eyes, look deep into my eyes...... after I count to three, you will feel the compulsion to give me that  piece of fish.One, two....

Because soy sauce is a natural preservative, theoretically, this sauce can be stored 'indefinitely' in the fridge. I'm not 100% certain on that fact because we use it so often, it usually doesn't last long!

I hope you enjoyed my first recipe post.  If you try this recipe, leave some feedback in the comments section and let me know how you liked it.  

Much love from Bunja and his Mummy xx