A Fast Coconut Curry Sauce for All Your Summer Salads

Inspired by conversations on the Food52 Hotline, we're sharing tips and tricks that make navigating all of our kitchens easier and more fun.

Today: KatieQ makes a spicy, creamy sauce for dolloping onto summer salads.

 

In our endless quest for Not Sad Desk Lunches, we often turn to the salad. It is a lunchtime saving grace, cobbled together with whatever is left in the fridge and assembled quickly in the closest plastic container that has a matching top. At Food52, many of us even bring salad components—leftover grains, a lonely carrot, a bunch of chives yanked from the tangle of the vegetable crisper—into the office, and combine forces with our colleagues and their rogue bits and bobs to make something filed loosely under "salad."

There is nothing that unites all these sometimes-incongruous parts like a good dressing, and KatieQ has a great one: a creamy coconut-curry sauce, made from coconut milk, curry powder, lemon zest, red pepper flakes, and pinches of sugar, salt, and cornstarch. After 10 minutes on the stove, it's ready to perform magic. Watch it bring your salad together, and then watch it disappear.

What are in your best summer salads? Share your finds in the comments.