Japanese Salad Recipes

From traditional seaweed and Western-style leafy greens to potato and noodle salads, you are assured of refreshing sides with Japanese salad recipes. The flavoursome ingredients, textures and presentations add balance to hearty meals.

If you want to add a pop of colour and crisp flavours to your dish, here are some of our favourite Japanese salad recipes:

Cabbage salad: Whether you want a side dish or lunch salad, try out a Japanese cabbage salad. Aside from shredded cabbages, this salad contains carrots and almonds, giving it a crunchy texture. You should consider adding a dressing like ginger mixed with peanut sauce or miso to add flavour.

Give our Japanese-style beef salad a try for a tasty variation.

Cucumber salad: Sunomono is a popular starter in Japanese cuisine. It’s a simple salad that is easy to make with a light, vinegary flavour and a crunch.

Japanese cucumber salad recipes involve slicing cucumbers and adding various dressings and sauces. Adding salt to the cucumber will draw out moisture, and you can rinse cucumbers before adding rice vinegar, sugar and soy sauce dressings.

Wafu dressing is a sauce or salad dressing made from a mixture of oil, soy sauce and rice vinegar. It adds authentic flavour to any Japanese salad recipe. If you want to make Wafu salad dressing at home, here is our recipe:

Choose your ingredients: The purpose of Wafu dressing is to add flavour without making the salad too rich. You need to pick your ingredients carefully to get the right flavour. The main ingredients are rice vinegar, soy sauce and oil. The wine vinegar and soy sauce create a delicious fusion of flavours. You require sugar to sweeten the flavour. You may also need garlic, chopped onions, salt and pepper. When choosing the oil to use, a neutral cooking oil like vegetable oil will enhance the taste. If you need some garnish for the dressing, sesame seeds are great.

Prepare the sauce: Add a tablespoon each of oil, vinegar and soy sauce, together with a teaspoon each of sugar, garlic, sesame seeds, salt and pepper in a bowl. Then, whisk them together until fully mixed. Taste the sauce and add any of the ingredients until it is to your liking. Once it is ready, pour the Wafu dressing into a container. You can either use it now on a salad or refrigerate it for up to a week.

Enjoy your salad: Wafu dressing can be used to enhance any salad. You can use it with any Japanese salad recipe for extra flavour, from leafy garden salads to seaweed salads. Why not try it with our Asian-style crumbed chicken salad and Asian-spiced chicken & sweet potato salad recipes?