Hearty, satisfying, and delicious steak salad that kicks your average green salad up a notch with sizzling steak and savory Japanese-style shoyu dressing!
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!
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- 12-16 oz ribeye steak (you can use flank steak or any cut you like)
- ½ tsp salt (kosher or sea salt; use half if using table salt)
- freshly ground black pepper
- 1 Tbsp neutral flavor oil (vegetable, canola, etc)
- ½ onion
- 4 Tbsp gluten-free soy sauce
- 2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 1½ Tbsp mirin
- 1 Tbsp sugar
- 1½ Tbsp rice vinegar
- ½ lemon (½ lemon = 2 Tbsp)
- 2 tsp white sesame seeds (roasted/toasted)
- 2 handful Asian greens (baby kale, mizuna, pak-choi, mizuna, komatsuna, baby spinach etc)
- 1 water melon radish
- 2 red radishes
- ½ English cucumber
- ½-1 avocado
- 6 cherry tomatoes
- Gather all the ingredients:
- Let the steak sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.
- Pat dry the steak with paper towel. Sprinkle both sides (and the edges) generously with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.
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Heat the olive oil in a cast iron pan on high heat. I usually use a silicone brush to apply the oil. Sear the steak in the pan, about 3-4 minute each side. During this time, do not move the steak around or flip. You can use tongs to press down so the steak gets nice sear marks.
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Remove the steak from the heat and let it rest on a cutting board for 10 minutes. If you cut the meat right away, all the juice will come out. Cut thin slices, against the grain of the meat.
- In a food processor, puree the onion.
- In a 1-cup measuring cup, add soy sauce, pureed onion, and olive oil.
- Add mirin, and sugar, and rice vinegar.
- Add lemon juice and sesame seeds and whisk all together.
- Assemble the salad with Asian greens (baby kale, Asian greens, baby spinach), water melon radish, red radishes, English cucumber, avocado, and cherry tomatoes. You can choose any leafy salad and other salad ingredients you like.
- Place the steak on top and drizzle the shoyu dressing.
Recipe by Namiko Chen of Just One Cookbook. All images and content on this site are copyright protected. Please do not use my images without my permission. If you’d like to share this recipe on your site, please re-write the recipe in your own words and link to this post as the original source. Thank you.
Full Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Kikkoman USA. Thoughts and opinions stated are my own.
