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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Steak Salad with Shoyu Dressing
Video
Ingredients
For Steak:
- 12-16 oz ribeye steak (you can use flank steak or any cut you like)
- ½ tsp kosher/sea salt (I use Diamond Crystal; use half for table salt)
- ⅛ tsp freshly ground black pepper
- 1 Tbsp neutral-flavored oil (vegetable, rice bran, canola, etc)
For Shoyu Dressing
- ½ onion
- 4 Tbsp gluten-free soy sauce
- 2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
- 1½ Tbsp mirin
- 1 Tbsp sugar
- 1½ Tbsp rice vinegar
- 2 Tbsp lemon juice (½ lemon)
- 2 tsp toasted white sesame seeds
For Salad
- 2 handful salad mix (baby kale, mizuna, pak-choi, mizuna, komatsuna, baby spinach etc)
- 1 watermelon radish
- 2 red radishes
- ½ English cucumber
- ½-1 avocado
- 6 cherry tomatoes
Instructions
- Gather all the ingredients:
To Prepare the Steak
- Let the steak sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.
- Pat dry the steak with a paper towel. Sprinkle both sides (and the edges) generously with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.
- 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 minutes 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.
- 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.
To Prepare Shoyu Dressing
- 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.
To Assemble the Salad
- Assemble the salad with salad mix (my Asian greens mix had baby kale, Asian greens, baby spinach in it), watermelon 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.
To Store
- You can keep the dressing and steak in an airtight container and store in the refrigerator for up to a week.
Full Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Kikkoman USA. Thoughts and opinions stated are my own.
Thank you Nami for all your wonderful recipes and beautiful photos. I really enjoy your blog and love to try your dishes. Have a great time in Japan. I wish to go there someday and see all the beauty firsthand.
Hi Vivian! Thank you for reading my blog and trying out my recipes. Thank you for your kind words. I’ll share my experience on Instagram while I was there (even though you don’t have the account, you can still see the pics too). Yes, I hope you get to visit one day. Until then I will document more places and write travel posts for your future trip. 😉
That….looks….wonderful. You have a gorgeous and tasty site. I have tried many of your recipes and love them all. Great photos and videos, too!.
Arigato for all the time you spend on this!
Hi Alyx! Thank you for your kind words! I’m so happy to hear my recipes came out well for you. Arigato for all your support and encouragement!
this sounds yummy! am going to make it tonight let you know how i did later!
Thanks so much for your recipes.
Hi Debbi! Hope you enjoy the recipe! Yes, I look forward to hearing from you! xo
I have friends who can’t tolerate gluten, so lately I’ve been buying only GF soy sauce. The flavor seems just the same to me! Anyway, what a nice dish — I’ll never say no to steak! Thanks for the comment.
Thank you John! I agree – GF soy sauce tastes just like regular soy sauce. It’s amazing, we can enjoy the same dish with family/friends who can’t tolerate gluten now! Japanese foods use soy sauce in many dishes, so this is really great for us! Have a lovely weekend!
This time of year we do a lot of salads like this. Whenever Bobby grills steak, he grills 2 and then we split one right off the grill and save the other for a steak salad. Have never used an Asian dressing but that can change Love your Shoyu dressing and the radish and other ingredients for your salad. Thanks Nami! Hope things are going well.
You steak looks perfectly cooked Nami. Yum!!!
Last night, I was preparing a salad for our dinner and wanted a different non-routine dressing. Namico’s Shoyu Dressing came to my mind. I made it and poured it on my salad. I am glad I made it and everyone ate the salad and complemented me. The dressing is easy to make – doesn’t take 5 minutes – and yet the taste is very good.
Namico, thank you for coming to my rescue last night.
FYI, after trying your Miso Salad Dressing, I have never used a store-bought this dressing. And again, thank you for the miso dressing.
Hi Steve! Thank you for trying my dressings (both shoyu and miso)! So happy to hear you like the recipes. Thank you for your kind feedback, Steve!
Hi Nami,
I experimented on this with miso marinated skirt steak..no dressing…It turned out great! What is great about your recipes is the variety of ways to play with the base recipe.
Alyx
Hi Alyx! I’m so happy to hear you adapted the recipe and it worked well! Thank you for your kind feedback, Alyx!
If I don’t have a food processor, can I just grate the onion?
Hi Alex! Sure! You can use a grater that can grate daikon finely. 🙂
I just tried the STEAK SALAD WITH SHOYU DRESSING and it was terrific. I made the dressing yesterday and left it in the refrigerator overnight. I think that really helped the flavors to develop. I didn’t have ribeye because it wasn’t on sale at my favorite grocery, so I used top sirloin filets. My family liked this recipe very much. We will be having this again soon.
Hi Pamela! I’m so happy to hear your family enjoyed this recipe! Yes, the dressing tastes better the following day as all the flavors come out naturally and blend well. So glad you tried this recipe. Thank you for your kind feedback! 🙂
Can’t wait to make this with our hot weather this week. A nearby Japanese restaurant top a similar salad with scallop sashimi. Thank you so much and happy Memorial Day 😃
Hi Karen! I hope you enjoy the recipe! Ohhh scallop sashimi… delicious!! Happy Memorial Day to you too!