Most Caesar dressing recipes make you work for it. You mash anchovy fillets into paste, temper a raw egg yolk, and hope the whole thing comes together instead of breaking on you. This one skips all of that. It starts with mayo.

That’s the whole trick. Mayo is already an emulsion of egg and oil, so it does the hard part before you even pick up a whisk. Five minutes, one bowl, no anchovies.

And it tastes like the Caesar salads at some of the best restaurants and steakhouses I’ve ever been to. That’s the bar I was aiming at, and this hits it.

Mayo + Worcestershire, doing the heavy lifting

Seven things go in the bowl. Four of them are carrying the recipe. Full amounts are in the recipe card above.

Mayo. This is the shortcut. Mayo is already an emulsion of egg and oil, so the structure you’d normally build by hand with a yolk is sitting in the jar, finished. It’s also what makes the dressing creamy instead of thin.

Worcestershire sauce. This is the flavor pop without the anchovy. Worcestershire is already built on anchovies, so you get the savory backbone out of a bottle you probably own instead of a tin of fillets you’d buy for one recipe and then forget about.

Dijon mustard. Two jobs. It adds sharpness to cut the mayo, and it helps hold the emulsion together when the olive oil goes in.

Parmesan. Salt and funk. Grate it yourself if you can. The pre-shredded stuff is coated to keep it from clumping, and that coating doesn’t melt into a dressing the way real Parmesan does.

The olive oil, black pepper, garlic, and salt round it out. Whisk the mayo, Worcestershire, and dijon into a smooth base before any oil goes in.

The towel trick

Step two is the only part where you need both hands. One hand is drizzling oil, the other is whisking, and there’s nothing left to hold the bowl. So the bowl starts spinning across the counter and you end up chasing it around with a stream of olive oil.

Put a kitchen towel under the bowl. Fold it into a ring or just lay it flat and set the bowl on top. It grips, the bowl stays put, and you can drizzle slow and whisk hard without a wrestling match. Slow and steady on the oil is what gets you a tight emulsion, and you can’t go slow if the bowl won’t hold still.

I use this for vinaigrettes too. Same problem, same fix, like when I’m whisking up the cider vinaigrette for an apple arugula salad.

What to serve it with

This is a steakhouse-style dressing, so it belongs next to steakhouse food. A wedge or a chopped romaine plate alongside a grilled ribeye with chimichurri butter is exactly the meal I had in mind when I was working on it. Add a side of Sam’s mashed potatoes, the Capital Grille version, and you’ve rebuilt a $90 dinner at home.

If you want a different salad in the rotation, the warm bacon and egg salade Lyonnaise is the one I make when I’m tired of Caesar.