Recreating a Salad from a Yakiniku Restaurant: A Choregi-Style Salad Made with Yakiniku Sauce, and an Obsession with Draining

The starting point this time is that there haven't been any side-dish videos lately, so the speaker wanted to make something packed with vegetables. The salad has just three ingredients: lettuce, Japanese leek (naganegi), and cucumber, and the dressing has a strong garlic kick. The restaurant's salad didn't include nori, but the speaker adds that since this is choregi-style, you can put some in. The quantities are about 300g of lettuce (roughly half a head), 60g of Japanese leek, and 1 cucumber (100g).

According to the speaker, the key to a delicious salad lies in how you prep the vegetables. So this time a salad spinner was brought in. It's a tool that spins the vegetables and uses centrifugal force to fling off the water. Prefacing it with "this isn't a promotional video," the speaker goes so far as to say that if you want to eat a truly great salad, you should buy one, and that with it, vegetables taste five times better.

The lettuce is cored and then torn by hand. The speaker says they prefer to tear it fairly small. The cucumber is sliced thinly rather than cut on the diagonal as is common in salads. This keeps some texture and also helps the dressing cling. Since this is "a salad where you're basically eating the dressing," ease of coating takes priority. The Japanese leek is also sliced thinly, using a cut the speaker doesn't usually use. The speaker explains that this is how leeks are cut for choregi salad, and that how you cut vegetables is extremely important.

Between tasks, there's some chatting with the staff. The topic was an incident on a video by Mr. Horie, with whom they previously collaborated: a commenter wrote "Good for you, eating your vegetables," and Horie pushed back hard, saying, "I don't eat them for my health. I eat vegetables because they taste good." The speakers laugh as they look back, saying the commenter probably never expected that kind of response. They say the comment section of the collaboration video also had quite a lot of harsh posts.

The speaker's own position, however, is the opposite of Horie's. They say they basically don't find vegetables tasty and eat them because it's better to. Acknowledging that this isn't something a cooking researcher should say, they explain that at an izakaya they never order vegetables first, and that left to their own devices they'd go for grilled offal or yakiniku.

One exception they cited was the grilled vegetables at yakitori restaurants. After looking into why they taste so good, they found out the vegetables are grilled while being brushed with chicken fat. The coating of chicken fat gives them umami, so the speaker's conclusion is that you should eat the vegetables when you go to a yakitori place.

The cut vegetables are left in the spinner, which is filled with water, and soaked for about 15 minutes. This makes the lettuce crisp and also takes the bite out of the leek. Raw Japanese leek is sharp on its own, so the speaker calls this step a two-for-one.

The dressing starts with grated garlic. The right amount is about 5g; too much and the garlic overpowers everything and it doesn't taste good. The garlic that had been prepared weighed 12g, so it was cut to less than half. The speaker says yakiniku restaurant salads usually contain garlic, and that's what makes them good.

Next comes 2 tablespoons of yakiniku sauce. Using yakiniku sauce is the part learned from the restaurant. The restaurant used its own homemade sauce, but the speaker says store-bought works perfectly well. Then 2 teaspoons of vinegar. Grain vinegar is fine, and swapping in lemon juice is also good. For oil, 3 tablespoons of rice bran oil, plus 2/3 teaspoon of salt. The speaker describes this as essentially a "salt-based dressing" and explains that the amount of salt makes a big difference.

The most important part, according to the speaker, is Ajinomoto: 16 shakes. It won't taste good unless you add about this much, and the speaker says the restaurant told them they add it too. The speaker also added that when it's used at a restaurant, customers never notice at all. One batch of this dressing is enough to finish off the full amount of vegetables above.

The vegetables that soaked for 15 minutes are lifted out and spun in the spinner. A single spin releases quite a lot of water, and the speaker shows it while explaining that if this water stays on the vegetables it waters down the dressing, which is why draining is necessary. Even on the second spin, more water comes out.

If you don't have a spinner, you can shake the vegetables in a colander or pat them dry with paper towels. The speaker also introduced another method: put the vegetables in a bowl, cover it with another bowl, and shake to throw off the water. Still, the spinner is overwhelmingly easier, and the speaker's view is that if a tool makes things easier, you should absolutely buy it, because "time is money."

Another important point is to toss the salad with the dressing rather than pour it over. This spreads the flavor throughout, and the yakiniku restaurant in question tossed it thoroughly, according to the speaker. The speaker likes strong flavors and adds all of the dressing, but since some people may find it too strong, they recommend starting with about 2/3.

Leaving out sesame oil is also deliberate. Adding sesame oil usually makes everything taste like sesame oil. Here the speaker also touched on the role of oil. Oil has viscosity, coating the vegetables and carrying umami onto them. So if you make an oil-free dressing, it's better to thicken it.

On that note, the speaker says frankly that lettuce doesn't taste good just bitten into whole. Admitting that they're forcing vegetables to taste good with the umami of oil and umami seasoning, they say there must be plenty of people in the world who likewise don't find vegetables tasty. Those people still want to eat vegetables, so the speaker's position is that they share ways to make them taste good. To finish, a pinch of salt was added for drinkers. The recipe serves 3 to 4.

At the tasting, the first thing noted was how thoroughly the flavor coats everything. The speaker says the yakiniku sauce brings out sweetness and umami, recalling that when they made it at home before, they ate almost all of it by themselves. A staff member said they couldn't stop eating it and likened its junk-food quality to "basically potato chips." The speaker even wondered whether this could really be called a salad.

Partway through, a large sheet of nori was torn and added, and it instantly took on a choregi character. Regular sheet nori is plenty, and since the dressing has a punch, it doesn't need to be Korean seaweed, the speaker says. Noting that nori isn't eaten much outside Japan, the speaker also said they were glad to have been born in Japan.

Asked about storage, the speaker answered that because it uses raw garlic, it should be eaten within about 3 days. If you grate and add the garlic right before use and mix only the other ingredients in advance, it's fine, according to the speaker.

Finally, the speaker went over the key points again. The dressing itself is very simple, and the reason this salad is so good is the use of a salad spinner. A salad that hasn't been properly drained really doesn't taste good, so drain the water thoroughly and then coat the vegetables evenly with the dressing: that was the closing message.

Near the end of the video, the speaker shared their views on Ajinomoto. When they previously worked at a restaurant called "Chianti," its dressing was well known, and coworkers would speculate about what was in it. The speaker had realized it was the taste of Ajinomoto. Since it's a flavor ordinary people can't detect, the speaker thought at the time that you might as well use it.

The speaker flatly calls the common claim that "using Ajinomoto makes you unable to taste subtle flavors" a lie. The basis is their own experience. They've been making a lot of additive-free dishes lately, and since they can still find those delicious, their palate hasn't been ruined, they say. The head chef at the sushi restaurant they frequent uses no Ajinomoto at all, yet the speaker finds that sushi delicious. That proves it, the speaker says. They also noted that overdoing soy sauce or salt will throw off your sense of taste too, so it's simply a matter of using everything in the right amount.

The speaker also mentioned seeing a well-known chef on TikTok saying "don't use Ajinomoto for children under 10." The speaker counters that using it for children makes no difference. They went on to mention that amino acids are said to stimulate the satiety center, and that there are efforts to make powdered products with added amino acids that help people avoid gaining weight. The speaker says they heard this from an Ajinomoto researcher. They say they don't like people claiming it "ruins your palate" when there is evidence showing it's harmless. On top of that, aware that they'd be told it sounds condescending, the speaker deliberately used strong language.

At the same time, the speaker repeatedly said, "I'm not saying you absolutely have to add Ajinomoto." When a staff member joked that there are restaurants that advertise being additive-free yet allow smoking, the speaker replied that secondhand smoke is far worse for your body. The speaker's conclusion was that it's fine either way: use it if you need it in pursuing your own idea of deliciousness, and don't if you don't.