Nuoc Cham Vinaigrette and 4 Salad Recipes

Summer love comes in many forms. How about falling for an easy, versatile dressing that you can quickly deploy for refreshing, life-giving salads? You don’t have to fall hard for this nước chấm vinaigrette. Just start with a salad-y summer fling.

Shaken, not stirred, in a jar, this nước chấm vinaigrette has inspired and saved me this past week when I needed to put together an easy meal. Whenever I used the dressing, my husband declared the results “Soooo good!” and “So delicious!”. I wonder how long my winning salad streak will last. It keeps going.

Leslie Brenner, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times “Food” section who writes Cooks without Border, seeded the dressing idea last Sunday, when she responded to my call for newsletter ideas. She mentioned a Viet-inspired salad served in Dallas, TX, that included cantaloupe, arugula, and cherry tomatoes seasoned by a fish sauce-ish, sweet, chile-inflected dressing.

Because I’ve never eaten the exact salad she described and it’s not part of the Vietnamese canon, I wondered if I could craft a multipurpose dressing for her and you to play with. Ideally, the dressing would be:

• Easy to prepare from staple ingredients

• Flexible for omnivores and herbivores

• Light to avoid weighing ingredients or you down

• Well balanced in being tart, sweet, umami filled, and spicy

• Stable in the fridge for several days

I may have accomplished all that in the form of this nước chấm vinaigrette. Many French-style vinaigrettes rely on a ratio of 1 part vinegar to 3 parts oil. In my dressing, a little oil helps to stabilize the ingredients and add a touch of fatty richness. Typically, nuts, seeds, and/or fried shallots enrich Viet-style salads, and you’ll see that I included them in my salad recipes.

So why call this a vinaigrette if it’s Viet? Because nước chấm (“dipping sauce”) is sometimes served as a salad dressing. I needed a name to distinguish this new recipe.

I’ve lived with the vinaigrette for the past week and have not tired of it. I wrote up all my ideas and am sharing them. In this post, you’ll find the dressing recipe (in text and PDF), a little video, plus four (4) salad ideas to jumpstart your creativity!

Now, here comes the uncomfortable part of having a newsletter as one of my income streams. Hopefully, you can financially support PTFS. Thanks for understanding.