A wide bowl of butter lettuce and thin-sliced cucumber glossy with a pale, cloudy yuzu vinaigrette, a small glass jar of the dressing and a halved yellow yuzu beside it

Yuzu Vinaigrette, and the Ponzu It Almost Is

Scratch the skin of a fresh yuzu and the smell arrives first, grapefruit at the start and then something sharper and greener that a lemon never gets to. Squeeze it and the reward is small: a spoonful of juice and a palmful of seeds. Japanese cooking made its peace with that long ago by treating yuzu as a seasoning. The peel is grated over raw or grilled fish; the juice goes into ponzu, into hotpot, and into sunomono, the little vinegared salads at the edge of a Japanese meal. This vinaigrette takes the same view of the fruit. Two tablespoons of bottled juice perfume a whole jar, and everything else in it is there to hold that perfume up without talking over it.

It takes ten minutes and keeps for a week. Its nearest relative is a bottle of ponzu, more than anything French, and that kinship is the most useful thing to know about it.

Ponzu, ponzu shoyu, and one rung further

The dark, salty citrus sauce that English dictionaries call ponzu has a more exact name in Japan: ponzu shoyu. Ponzu itself is citrus juice sharpened with vinegar and has no soy in it at all. Japanese dictionary definitions name the juice of daidai, a bitter orange, and sudachi among the fruits it is made from. Mizkan, the vinegar maker behind the bottled ponzu shoyu called Ajipon, draws the line in the same place: the soy is what turns ponzu into ponzu shoyu.

Seen that way, this dressing is one more rung on a short ladder.

  • Citrus and vinegar. Ponzu: sour, fragrant, unsalted, a seasoning for sharpening other things.
  • Add soy. Ponzu shoyu, the dipping sauce for hotpot.
  • Add oil. This vinaigrette. The oil softens the acid enough to coat raw leaves and carries the yuzu across a whole bowl of salad.
  • Add a dab of yuzu kosho. The same dressing with chile heat, for anything coming off a grill.

The ladder is also how to fix it. A dressing that tastes mostly of soy has slid back toward ponzu shoyu and wants oil and a few drops of yuzu. One that tastes oily and vague has lost its acid rung.

Why it uses two acids

Yuzu juice brings far more aroma than acid body for its volume, so it works best with a partner. Rice vinegar does the plain work. It adds sourness without much aroma to compete, which widens the acid while the yuzu stays in front. Two parts yuzu to one part vinegar is where this recipe settles. Lean further toward yuzu and the dressing turns perfumed and thin; lean toward the vinegar and it starts to taste like sushi rice. The acid runs a little sharper than the 3 to 1 of the vinaigrette ratio guide, which suits the fatty and bitter things this dressing is best on.

The oil is chosen to follow. A big peppery olive oil is made to lead a dressing, and here that job belongs to the yuzu, so a neutral oil carries the base with one teaspoon of toasted sesame oil for warmth underneath. Soy does most of the salting and supplies the savory depth citrus lacks. A teaspoon of honey rounds the edge. It has to be stirred into the acid before the oil goes in, because honey does not dissolve in oil; added late, it sinks to the bottom of the jar and stays there.

There is no mustard, so nothing holds the dressing together for long. Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking describes a plain vinaigrette as a temporary emulsion: shaking breaks the oil into droplets that hang in the acid for a while and then drift back together. In a jar that hardly matters, since a quick shake restores it. The mustard emulsion guide covers what a stabilizer changes, and the house vinaigrette recipe is the mustard-bound version of this idea, with olive oil at the center.

Temperature is the quieter risk. Aroma compounds are volatile by nature and heat drives them off, so yuzu goes into the dressing and the dressing goes onto warm food at the table, never into a pan. Cold works the other way, holding the aroma in, so a jar straight from the fridge smells of very little. Ten minutes on the counter gives it back.

Ingredients

About 2/3 cup (150 ml), enough for six salads.

The Yugeta shoyu producer guide explains what the second brewing is.

Method

  1. Dissolve. Put the yuzu juice, rice vinegar, soy sauce, honey and salt in a small jar with a lid and stir with a fork or chopstick until the honey has disappeared and nothing sits on the bottom. If you are using yuzu kosho, work it in now too; it breaks up far more easily in the acid than in oil.
  2. Shake. Add the neutral oil and the sesame oil, close the jar and shake hard for 15 to 20 seconds. The dressing is ready when two clear layers have become a single cloudy, slightly thickened liquid, which means the oil has broken into droplets small enough to cling to a leaf.
  3. Taste on a leaf. Dip a piece of whatever you are dressing and taste that, not a spoonful; a dressing balanced on a spoon reads timid on a leaf. Add a few drops of yuzu if it seems dull and a little honey if it bites. If it is still flat, add salt.
  4. Dress late. Toss the salad just before it goes to the table, with your hands or two spoons, starting with less dressing than you think and adding more until every leaf is lightly coated with nothing pooling beneath. For warm noodles or fish, spoon it on off the heat.
  5. Keep. Leftovers go in the fridge in the closed jar for up to a week. The layers will separate and the smell will go quiet; give the jar ten minutes on the counter and shake it again, and both come back.

When it goes wrong

Nothing here is cooked, so every failure is one of balance or timing. Sweet at the bottom of the jar and flat at the top means the honey went in after the oil and never dissolved. Stir a spoonful of the dressing with the sunken honey in a cup and shake it back in. A salad that tastes of nothing, with dressing sliding off into a puddle, was built on wet leaves: the water diluted the dressing and broke it on contact. Spin or blot the greens dry.

Too salty is the easiest problem to fix, and a spoonful more oil with a few drops of yuzu brings it back. A harsh dressing wants a fattier plate as much as more honey. This vinaigrette is at its best against avocado, oily fish and bitter leaves, and it can taste aggressive on a bare spring mix. If the yuzu has gone quiet, the jar is too cold. If the dressing was warmed in a pan, that aroma is gone for good, and the only fix is a fresh spoonful of juice added off the heat.

What it goes on

Bitter and crunchy things take to it best: radicchio and other chicories, shaved fennel, thin-sliced cabbage, cucumber smashed and salted for ten minutes. Over avocado halves with a few flakes of salt it is a first course. Tossed with cold buckwheat soba (shop buckwheat soba noodles), sliced scallions and a handful of blanched spinach it becomes a light dinner. Spooned over just-seared fish, or over a tin of good tuna broken onto greens (the tinned tuna guide sorts out which cut to use), it does the work of a lemon wedge, with more to say.

Two variations are worth making on purpose. Sudachi juice (shop Yakami Orchard sudachi juice) comes from one of the other citrus fruits ponzu is traditionally made with, and it can replace the yuzu in the same quantity for a different dressing in the same family. The yuzu kosho version is the one for the grill. Kosho is a paste of yuzu peel and chile ground with salt, a specialty of Kyushu and above all Oita Prefecture, and a quarter teaspoon adds chile heat and a second dose of yuzu peel to the jar.

Worth bringing up at the table

The word ponzu came into Japanese from the Dutch pons, meaning punch, a citrus drink. Because the sauce is sour, the final syllable came to be written with the character for vinegar.

Yuzu kosho has no black pepper in it. Kosho normally means black pepper, but in parts of Kyushu the word is used for chiles, and the condiment kept the local name.

Yuzu's smell has a molecule attached to it. In 2009 chemists at the Japanese flavor company T. Hasegawa identified a compound in the peel oil they named yuzunone, present in tiny amounts and, in their sensory tests, a major contributor to yuzu's distinctive smell. It is often described as found nowhere else in citrus. That is nearly true. A year later, members of the same team reported it in the Kinokuni mandarin, a Japanese variety, as a significant aroma contributor not found in the ordinary satsuma it was compared with.

And on the winter solstice, bathhouses and households across Japan float whole yuzu in hot baths. The custom dates to the Edo period. An 1838 almanac of Edo's seasonal customs, the Tōto Saijiki, records public bathhouses heating yuzu baths on the day, and the habit is usually traced to Edo bathhouses drawing customers, helped along by a pun: tōji, the solstice, sounds like tōji, a hot-spring cure. The bath was believed to ward off winter colds, a belief that may be optimistic. The fragrance filling a steamy room is the quality this dressing is built to protect.

The yuzu guide follows the fruit into its other forms.

The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, where visitors can ask staff questions. Products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

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