Easy Cucumber Salad

Hello everyone, you’re watching Preppy Kitchen where I, John Canal, teach you how to make delicious home-cooked dishes to share with your family and friends. Today we’re making a cucumber salad with dill, mint, pickled red onions, and love. Let’s get started.

Making the Dressing

First off, we’re making the dressing. I’m using ½ cup of white vinegar—you could use a champagne or a white-wine vinegar if you want to be fancy—¼ cup of water, and ⅓ cup of granulated sugar. We’re gonna mix that in there: mix, mix, mix, mix, mix, and put it on high heat, stirring until it just becomes clear, then set it aside.

Pickling the Red Onion

I’m using a small red onion and I think I’m going to use most of it; I want to end up with ½ to ¾ cup, depending on how much you like onion. The key, though, is that it’s not going to be raw onion going in here—it’s gonna get marinated in the vinegar-water-sugar solution and it’ll lose a lot of its bite and become kind of pickled. Love the color of a red onion—so beautiful. We’re gonna give this onion nice thin slices like this; slice too thick—mm-hmm. The key is that the onion gives you a nice burst of flavor and a little bit of bite, but it’s not gonna be overpowering, so part of that is controlling the size of the slices.

Today I’m making the salad for a barbecue, but it would go perfectly with stuffed chicken breast or spanakopita, and you would be in heaven. Notice: no tears, no tears from the onions because of magic. All right, so what we’re gonna do is let this hang out over here in that vinegar mixture, move it around, and then while we do the rest of our prep this will be marinating and losing all that onion bite that—well, you know—no one wants to kiss you after that; this will fix that.

Preparing the Cucumbers

This recipe calls for three English cucumbers; however, I totally spaced out at the market—I call it dad brain—and I bought regular cucumbers, but that’s fine too. You don’t have to use English cucumbers. The only reason that’s specified in a lot of recipes is they have a beautiful delicate skin so you don’t have to peel them, but I wanted to peel them anyway to get some more visual interest. Here’s what we’re gonna do: just peel off a few strips—not all of the skin—and then you’ll have a little bit of a stripy situation happening, and it’ll make your salad all the more beautiful. The other cucumbers I’m pretty sure have a good amount of produce wax on them as well, so the skin isn’t always amazing to eat.

We’re gonna give these a pretty thin slice. How thin is kind of up to you: some people want a big chunk of cucumber, some people want paper-thin little wafers that become kind of more soft. I’m someplace in the middle—about an eighth of an inch or so. You can add some variety. I totally love the way these pieces look with just a little bit of the skin hanging out—they look so fancy. Repeat this process for the other two and we’ll move on.

Salting the Cucumbers

Here’s the deal: these cucumbers are basically pure water, so as soon as we add in our dressing and our salt they’re going to weep out a lot of water and you’ll have kind of a watery mess. Maybe you like that—in which case, move it along—but if you don’t want your dressing so watered-down, then what we’re gonna do is salt these cucumbers; they will release a lot of water with salt. I’m using a teaspoon of salt and just sprinkling it over my layers of cucumbers, tossing them up. Basically you want to distribute the salt to all the different pieces. Now they taste delicious, by the way—mm-hmm. Cover up, pop it in the fridge, and we’ll be back in maybe half an hour, an hour—see you soon.

Finishing the Salad

So it’s been about 40 minutes and let’s take a look at what happened. They look just like normal cucumbers, but what’s all this stuff? That’s the extra water that we didn’t want in our salad. I mean, I should have used a strainer—what am I thinking? If this weren’t so salty I would drink this straight—maybe like a dirty martini, I don’t know. Setting it aside, here we have our deliciously less-watery cucumbers, and while that was chilling this has been hanging out and we have some semi-pickled—mmm—red onions. Just pour this over and give it a toss. This is perfectly delicious just like this; you can chill it or you can keep going like we are.

Adding Fresh Herbs

First off is some fresh dill. I love fresh dill—I’m so happy whenever I go to a market where they sell it in big bunches like this instead of those little plastic containers, which are totally not cool, people, but also so expensive—that’s like eight dollars for half a sprig. Harvesting a lot of this dill, removing a couple of the stems; this is around where my recipe says ¼ cup, but you know, it’s like garlic—how much do you want? I love dill. That’s for older people who watched that Saturday Night Live skit—now totally delicious.

But what else could we add? How about just a little bit of fresh mint—yes, mint and cucumber—hello. I just removed the leaves; you can give them a rip, you can give them a little bit of a chop, or whatever makes you happy, as it is your salad. If anyone in Texas or a Southern state is watching, would you let me know if “I don’t give a rip” is something people say, or is that just one character on Real Housewives of Dallas? Let me know.

Maybe ¼ cup of mint sprinkled in there, and I would say you’re done. All you want to do now is season with a little bit of salt and pepper to taste. That is wonderful—this tastes like summer: the mint, the cucumber—how could you say no to this? It’s a perfect side dish for nearly anything I can think of, but oh my gosh, you’ve gotta trust me on this—just try it. Even if you don’t like onions, these are like candy now.