Are you ready to turn this…
into this…
in 15 minutes or less?
This Soy & Sesame Cucumber Salad is quick and healthy recipe. It only takes a few ingredients. It’s an amazingly refreshing side dish and I just love eating it as a quick snack.
Trust me, I kept picking at the cucumbers while it was marinating in the dressing. If I wasn’t working to post the finished product here, it would have disappeared a lot sooner than that!
For this recipe, I used Persian cucumbers. It’s like a baby-sized English cucumber with only a few slight differences. They are both thin-skinned, but the Persian cucumber has a few less seeds and the skin isn’t as waxy as I’ve found the English cucumbers to be. If you can’t get a Persian cucumber, or just have English cucumbers laying around, you can use an English one too!
The first step is to prep the cucumbers. This means peeling small strips of the skin off, alternating between skin and no skin. Then, slice the cucumber in half the long way.
After that, use a spoon to scoop out all the seeds in the cucumbers.
Once you’re done scooping out the seeds, cut the cucumbers into small pieces. I cut mine in a half moon shape because I used a Persian cucumber and it was pretty tiny. If using an English cucumber, I’d cut the halves into quarters first for a more bite-size piece.
Once you’re done prepping the cucumbers, it’s time to add the dressing! In this particular recipe, I decided to use soy & sesame, but the key components to making a good pickling dressing is having salt, acid and if you like, sweetness and some spice.
So following that, this soy & sesame dressing has 2 parts soy sauce, 2 parts vinegar, 1 part marin, and 1/2 part sesame oil. I topped it off with some salam oelek garlic chili sauce (because I LOVE spicy foods) and sesame seeds to garnish.
The essential ingredients in this recipe is the soy sauce, sesame oil, and vinegar. If you’re making a huge batch of this, I’d advise to use the sesame oil a bit more sparingly than written because it is really strong in flavor.
I also added marin to add some sweetness to it which I personally like. You can substitute it for 1 part sugar instead if you’d like. Feel free to play around with the ratio of your dressing since it’s really to your own personal preference!
Soy & Sesame Cucumber Salad
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 clove garlic, sliced
.5 tablespoon mirin or 1 tablespoon cane sugar (optional)
1 teaspoon garlic chili paste (optional)
1. Prep cucumbers. Start by peeling thin stripes of skin from your cucumber so that it alternatives from peeled to skin. Then, cut the cucumber in half, the long way. Use a spoon and scoop out all the seeds in the inside, leaving just the crunchy part of the cucumber. Finally, dice the cucumbers into quarter inch pieces. Dry off the cucumbers.
2. Make soy & sesame marinade. Mix together the soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil, garlic and the optional mirin/sugar and chili paste. Pour over the cucumbers. (I’ve made this so many times that I just eyeball these ingredients and pour right on top of my cukes.)
3. Let the cucumbers marinade for 10 minutes. Can you let it marinade for that long without nibbling at it? Also, the best part is that the longer this sits, the better it gets! You can keep this in your refrigerator for 1-2 days, if it lasts you that long.
Voila, a quick and healthy snack!
