Susan's Lite Goddess Dressing

A couple of weeks ago, someone in the Fatfree Vegan YahooGroup asked if anyone had a lower-fat alternative to Annie's Goddess Dressing. Over the years I've heard a lot about this dressing, but I'd never tasted it. Since it comes so highly recommended, I decided to buy a bottle, test it out, and try to make my own recipe.

When I looked at the bottle in the grocery store, I realized why I'd never bought it before: at 130 calories and 13 grams of fat per serving, it gets 90% of its calories from fat (from canola oil and tahini). But I bought it, took it home to try it, and immediately decided I was better off never having tasted it! It's so delicious, it's almost addictive: thick with a deep, almost smoky sesame taste. I knew immediately that it was going to be hard to come anywhere near its flavor without using lots of tahini.

But I gave it a shot, and while my Goddess dressing doesn't taste exactly like Annie's, it does maintain some of the sesame taste while managing to be significantly lighter. Instead of using a base of canola oil, I opted instead for lite silken tofu. I used pretty much the same seasonings as Annie's, but I cut the tahini down to one tablespoon and used 1/4 teaspoon of sesame oil to enhance the sesame flavor. When it's all blended together, this whips up into a very thick dressing, but in a "fluffy" rather than heavy way. And in terms of calories, you can have almost 7 times as much of my dressing for the same amount of calories in 2 tablespoons of Annie's. How many of us really use only 2 tablespoons of dressing, anyway?

In fact, my recipe is so light that I almost wish I had used more tahini in it. I wanted to keep it very low in fat, but if you'd like a more pronounced sesame flavor, feel free to add more tahini. Just remember, for every tablespoon of tahini that you add, you increase the fat content of one serving by about 1 gram.



Susan's Lite Goddess Dressing

Make this dressing more like the original by increasing the tahini a tablespoon at a time, until it tastes the way you like. Remember that the fat and calories go up as the tahini increases!

6 ounces lite firm silken tofu (1/2 pkg. of Mori-Nu)
1/4 cup water
1 1/2 tablespoons cider vinegar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons low-sodium soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon tahini
2 green onions, white parts removed, chopped
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley, packed
1 large clove garlic

Place all ingredients in blender and process until smooth. (The Magic Bullet worked well for this.)

Makes 10 servings of 2 tbsp. each. Per serving: 19 Calories (kcal); 1 g Total Fat; (45% calories from fat); 1 g Protein; 1 g Carbohydrate; 0 mg Cholesterol; 164 mg Sodium

Here's a nutritional comparison of my dressing to the original:



Tags: vegan recipes vegetarian cooking food low-fat Eat to Live