Avocado, Tomato, Cucumber, Broccoli Salad with Wasabi-Sesame dressing

Once again I've come across a very simple salad with an awesome and unique dressing. The restaurant is one of our favorites - Maido - in Kanazawa Bunko. The menu lists it as baked avocado and fresh tomato salad with sesame-wasabi dressing.  This would be good on any salad, and even as a vegetable dipping sauce.

Below is the picture of the salad at the restaurant.

Restaurant version

Chef Suzuki uses sesame seed puree/paste (also called tahini or neri-goma), homemade mayonnaise, soy sauce, and wasabi.

Although I could probably have found sesame seed paste (and later did - some pictures below), I instead stumbled across a product called Goma-dare. This means sesame seed dipping sauce. It's most often used as a shabu-shabu sauce.  This sauce worked very well as a substitute for the sesame seed paste.

A recipe for homemade goma-dare can be found at this good site.

Maido's chef lists all the ingredients on his blog but doesn't list the exact recipe. Through experimenting I came up with this:
3 tablespoons mayonnaise
4 tablespoons goma-dare (ごまだれ) sauce
Wasabi paste to taste (I used about a teaspoon but will add more next time)
Dash of soy sauce (the goma-dare sauce I used already listed Shoyu as an ingedient so I just added a few drops more)

Ingredients and after mixing

Cook the broccoli just enough (blanch) to slightly soften it then cool and drain. Cut up some fresh tomatoes and cucumber. I prefer the Japanese cucumber, and be sure to use fresh local grown tomatoes if you can, not the plastic ones found in some grocery stores.  Char the avocado a bit using either the oven broiler or over the stove top as I did in this other Maido salad recipe.

Yaki Avocado and Tomato Cucumber Broccoli salad with Sesame-Wasabi dressing - home version 

After that its just a matter of plating and adding the dressing around the vegetables.

To follow the original restaurant recipe more precisely you should use sesame paste. The paste will result in  a thicker dressing - and you can see the difference between the home version and the Maido version. Below are two bottles you might see in stores. The second one is available at the commissary.

Neri Goma

Neri Goma

Neri is "paste" and Goma is "sesame seeds." Since this does not have any other ingredients added to it, you should add a bit more soy sauce if using it. I found the goma-dare sauce to be pretty good tasting to start with so will likely just stick with it in the future, and not go to the pure goma paste.

Update: I also found some goma-dare with wasabi already mixed in at the LIVIN store.

Goma dare wasabi

Wasabi paste can be found in the supermarket. S&B Foods markets quite a few wasabi paste (tube spices as they call them) options. If in the U.S. they will label them with English, still under the S&B brand.

4 wasabi paste options all from S&B foods

The two on the right are more "high end" and I picked up a few, but haven't tasted them yet to see what the difference is.  Remember that 本わさび (hon wasabi) means it's real and not the horseradish substitute. I explained this a bit more in the salmon chili recipe.

For soy sauce, I like to use the one shown below which which happens to be gluten free. I don't use it simply because it's gluten free though, I use it because of the  3 year process for making it and because of the taste.

Gluten free soy sauce