You can use this creamy spicy cashew sauce in bowls, as creamy salad dressing, in wraps, sandwiches or with grilled fish or chicken at dinner. It’s versatile, flavorful and made with just a few simple ingredients including cashews, basil, garlic and jalapenos.

This simple cashew sauce recipe is healthy, dairy-free, gluten-free, paleo and vegan. It tastes so good, you wouldn’t believe it’s actually better for you. So if you’re looking for a creamy dairy-free sauce to spice up your meals, you just found it! Make it as spicy as you wish, by adding more or fewer of the jalapenos.

Soak The Cashews

To make the spicy cashew sauce creamy you want to soak the cashews overnight in water. You can also soak the nuts in hot water for 20-30 minutes if you forgot to do it the night before. We find the longer we let them soak, the creamier the consistency of the sauce.

Also since it’s unbearably hot right now and we somehow always get sick when the AC is on 24/7 (it’s not pretty), we actually keep the soaked cashews in the fridge overnight. This prevents them from spoiling.

Ingredients For The Spicy Creamy Cashew Sauce

Soaked Cashews. We’re using raw cashews as the base for this creamy sauce.

Pickled jalapenos. To add spice, saltiness and make the condiment more tangy. You can also use fresh jalapenos and if you do, make sure to add salt to taste and about 1 tbsp of lemon juice for the tanginess.

Basil. We love love love basil in sauces! It’s one of our favorite herbs and we happened to have a lot of it at the time we made this sauce. It turned out so well. You can also experiment with some mint, dill or cilantro for different flavors.

Garlic. No surprise there, garlic adds so much flavor to sauces and dressings, and basically anything. To be honest, we don’t even count the one clove of garlic that goes into this recipe, because at this point of the PAND***C we are basically half garlic.

Water. Yes, the elixir of life. You need to add some water to be able to blend the cashews. You can adjust the amount in order to make the cashew sauce thicker or more liquid if you want to use it more like dressing.

How it comes together

To make this spicy dairy-free sauce you will:

soak the cashews overnight in water or for 20-30 minutes in hot water
put the soaked cashews, jalapenos, water, garlic and basil into a high-speed blender (you can probably even use an immersion blender or a nut/coffee grinder)
blend for about one minute or until smooth and creamy
do a taste test and adjust for saltiness, spicy-ness and tanginess if needed

Enjoy!

How To Use This Creamy Spicy Cashew Sauce

This flavorful cashew sauce is a great dairy-free condiment that you can use to flavor anything you think might need spice. Here are some great ways to use it:

in salads and healthy bowls (especially good with roasted vegetables!)
for wraps or tacos
mix with shredded chicken and serve in a lettuce wrap with some extra veggies for a light dinner option
serve along meat, shrimp or fish and salad for dinner

These are just a few ways we usually use this tasty sauce!