Vegan Caesar salad

Back in the 80s, Western food wasn’t that accessible in Hong Kong. I still remember the day when McDonald’s and Pizza Hut arrived in my area, it was a huge deal! I was on my best behaviour for months, and endlessly begged my mom to take me to either one of them but unfortunately it never happened. My family was quite poor back then and eating out was very costly.

However, I’ve always been curious about food – since I was a very young age – and I was unstoppable. When I was fifteen and a half, I applied to work in McDonald’s as my first part-time job. In the following 3 months, I tried every single item on the menu. I used my first salary to then try KFC and Pizza Hut. Please forgive my junk food preference 🙈 I was just a teenager, and those food chains didn’t have a bad reputation at the time.

I remember the first Caesar salad I ever had was from Pizza Hut. It was romaine lettuce, a boiled egg, parmesan cheese, croutons, and Caesar dressing. I can’t remember whether I liked it or not, but I do remember that my first impression was “Gosh, few pieces of lettuce cost me 3 hours wages, and worst of all, it’s not even cooked”. 😂😂😂 I guess as a teenager I didn’t really appreciate the beauty of a salad.

It’s normal for our taste buds to change as we grow older, in my 20s I started to appreciate salad more and more; as Caesar salad was the first salad I ever tried it always has a special place in my mind even if it isn’t my favourite.

Today I will show my version of a Caesar salad, where the East meets the West because I am using tofu for the dressing.

This is a vegan recipe, so I use avocado to replace the boiled egg. Generally, to make a portion for 2 people, you will only need 1/2 an avocado. But, mine was tiny so I used a whole one.

I also use ground roasted hazelnuts to give the look of parmesan, but this is completely optional as it doesn’t impact the taste too much.

Preheat the oven to 180C. Cut the bread into 1-2cm squares.

Line a baking tray with parchment paper, transfer the bread to it and bake until it’s nicely golden, this will take around 10 minutes. Remove them from the oven and set aside.

If you’re feeling lazy, you can buy read-made croutons from the supermarket.

Add all the dressing ingredients to a blender and blend until smooth.

For me, the Caesar dressing must be smooth, rich and creamy, however, my blender is rather crappy. After I tried to blend different nuts together, the results were not what I expected, so I thought why not try something easy to blend instead – here we go! The result was amazing… the dressing is incredibly rich and creamy.

Plus, the best part about this dressing is there’s no nut soaking involved, and it only takes 5 minutes so you can make this salad anytime.

Assemble the greens on a plate.

Spread the croutons over the salad, drizzle with the dressing, sprinkle the ground roasted hazelnuts on top and serve.

I’m very into food history, and every time I try a new recipe, especially a non-Asian one, I love to do a little research about the history of the dish For some reason, I always thought Caesar’s salad originated from Italy, but it seems that I am wrong.

Fun fact, Caeser salad was created by an Italian restaurateur Caesar Cardini who immigrated to Mexico in 1924. He then moved to America in 1936 due to the Mexican government’s ban on gambling which caused a drastic fall in the hospitality and tourism business. Unsurprisingly, he took the salad recipe to America with him where it went viral and spread around the world. 

Let me know if you try out this recipe. You can leave a comment below, or take a picture and tag it with #k33_kitchen and share it on Instagram! I’d love to see what you come up with. Cheers, hope you enjoy my recipes!