Hollyhock Salad Dressing

The Canada Post letter carrier who delivers mail at my apartment building gave me a recipe for a salad dressing I later learned was famous: Hollyhock Salad Dressing. The recipe she gave me is this one.  I made a few changes. This is my version:

• 3/4 cup Bragg’s nutritional yeast
• 1/3 cup water
• 1/3 cup tamari
• 1/3 cup Bragg’s apple-cider vinegar
• 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard (helps with the emulsion – LG)
• 3 large cloves of garlic, thinly sliced on garlic mandoline or coarsely chopped
• 1 cup canola oil [or avocado oil — avocado oil is good, but expensive]

In a blender, combine yeast, water, tamari, vinegar, garlic, and mustard for one minute. With the blender on high, remove the centre of the lid and SLOWLY drizzle in the oil. Stop the blender as soon as all the oil has been added. Keep in a sealed jar for up to 2 weeks.

I use an immersion blender. I put the first 6 ingredients into the blender’s (fairly large) beaker, blend them, and then add oil slowly (i.e., a little at a time) as I continue blending.

The recipe makes a pint. Pick jar accordingly.

A couple of oddities in the original recipe:

1. The recipe commented that the tamari could be gluten-free. Could be? Tamari is gluten free, being made purely from soybeans. (Shoyu/soy sauce does use some wheat. That’s what makes it different from tamari.)
2. The recipe specified grapeseed or sunflower oil, both of which are terrible oils in terms of their omega-6 to omega-3 ratio. Canola’s omega-6 to omega-3 ratio is 2:1, close to the ideal of 1:1. The ratio for grapeseed oil is 676:1(!) and for sunflower oil is 40:1 — see this post. Canola oil also has the neutral taste that works well in this dressing. (I was warned that the flavor of extra-virgin olive oil does not work well in this dressing.) I use organic cold-pressed canola oil.

An Asian-Inflected Variant

I like this variant:

• rice wine vinegar (unflavored and unsweetened — example) instead of apple-cider vinegar; and
• replace 2 tablespoons of canola oil with toasted sesame oil — that is, put 2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil in a measuring cup, then add canola oil to make 1 cup total; and
• add about 1/2″ fresh ginger root, sliced thinly; and
• keep everything else the same, including garlic and mustard.