Spicy Cashew Dressing  | Healthy Salad Dressing

 

Spicy Cashew Dressing  | Healthy Salad Dressing

If you’re looking for a healthy homemade dressing to fall in love with, spicy cashew dressing may be your new favorite. Finding health salad dressing at a store that isn’t $8 a bottle is getting harder and harder. Even then, it’s got ingredients I don’t want in it. I’ve been trying to make my own for the past 7-8 years. Once I became acutely aware of all the ingredients I don’t want and the ingredients my clients wanted to avoid while doing elimination phase of testing their food sensitivities, homemade dressings became a hobby! But after making and tasting the difference, it’s much more like an obsession. Fresh ingredients without preservatives, gums, and garbage are just so much better!

One of the best ingredients to make flavor pop is fresh ginger. It’s included here in spicy cashew dressing. If you have a blender (hello! I know you do by now!) you can whip this up in minutes. Some recipes call for soaking cashews before using them, and others don’t.

To Soak or Not Soak Cashews

Here’s the rule of thumb for soaking cashews. (If you’re in a hurry soaking is negotiable. If you think about this in advance, and want to make spicy cashew dressing, I’d soak overnight, whip this dressing up in the morning and refrigerate to blend flavors until you’re ready to serve it).

If your recipe (like this one) is on the thicker side soaking helps increase liquid as the cashews absorb a significant amount of water. If your blender is something like the little engine that could and not real high-powered, soaking is easy on it. With a high-power blender or food processor it doesn’t really matter. However, I personally find getting my food processor out, put together, and then taken apart… is a major drawback and if a blender works, I’m using it.

Ingredients for this Cashew-Based Dressing:

• 1/3 cup + 2 T raw cashews
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 3 T coconut aminos
• 2 T nutritional yeast
• 1 T pure maple syrup
• 1 T sesame oil
• Juice of 1 lime
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 tsp ginger, grated
• 1 tsp sriracha, (more if you like spice)
• sea salt to taste (I use Colima)

Instructions:

Simply add all the ingredients to a blender or food processor. (See above for details on soaking vs not your cashews. No need if you have a high-powered blender). Chill for best flavor. It will thicken as it cools so adding a little more water may be necessary, especially if you don’t soak cashews.

Flip: I don’t like it very sweet. If you like things a bit more on the savory side, this dressing is still one you’ll enjoy but you might want to reduce the amount of maple syrup you add until you taste it. The combo of maple syrup, ginger and sriracha are a taste surprise, so you do want them all but might want to play with your own amounts.

Pair it with these salad ingredients:

• A mixed greens salad with ½ cup artichoke hearts and some pumpkin seeds (adds approximately 6g fiber)
• Add “butter beans” and roasted beets to increase fiber (read below why this is SO important to you)

Spicy Cashew Dressing Skips the Dairy, Soy, and Preservatives

In addition to just being plain good, and maybe more respectful to something you just picked from your garden or the farmer’s market, this dressing helps reduce your exposure to inflammatory foods that your gut may not be responding well to in midlife. Dairy is something I cut out years ago, when I was 31 actually, to reduce inflammation and mucous as a runner. The difference was significant in gut health, skin clarity and it was easy to enjoy high calcium with a healthy diet so this wasn’t even a concern. I lectured on this for decades. Dairy, if for you it causes leaky gut, isn’t actually helping you absorb calcium. It may interfere. That’s a shocker for a lot of women. For a short time I was still and do from time to time eat high-quality aged cheese (Tillamook brand is one that works) Occasional consumption if your gut is in good shape, usually won’t be an issue for most women. It’s the “little bit daily” – hello cream in coffee – that can destroy you.

Adding Fiber

There’s a post you’ll want to locate to get the full monty on fiber’s list of desirable traits! Stay full? Check! Blood sugar benefits? Check! Better digestion? All fiber isn’t created equal. You may be getting less than you think. Read the post to learn more. 

An excerpt from the post:  In new research we see that nutrition is not complete without the addition of sufficient fiber to meet gut and colon nutritional needs. Diets containing more than 50 g of fiber per day are associated with low colon cancer risk. Current dietary fiber requirements are based on cardiovascular health ignoring needs for colon health. Add to that the benefits of fiber for weight loss support, and you have a persuasive argument for fiber.

Questions? There is an abundance of content in blogs, podcasts here on Flipping 50 to help. Try the Food Flip (open select times a year) for support if you need a real shift in your dietary habits because of bloating, or gas you’ve never experienced before.