Ready in five minutes with six ingredients. Light, sharp and the one salad that disappears before anything else on the table.
Salt the Cucumber First
Slice the cucumber thin, toss it with half a teaspoon of salt and leave it in a colander while you do everything else. Ten minutes later you will pour off a surprising amount of water. That water is the reason most cucumber salads turn into soup twenty minutes after they are dressed, and this is the only step that prevents it.
The Six Things
- One large cucumber, sliced as thin as your patience allows.
- Half a red onion, sliced and rinsed under cold water so it stops shouting.
- A handful of cherry tomatoes, halved.
- Rice vinegar, one tablespoon.
- Sesame oil, one teaspoon — any more and it takes over.
- Salt, used twice: once to draw water out, once to season at the end.
Dress it at the table rather than in the kitchen. Cucumber keeps its snap for about fifteen minutes after the vinegar goes on, and everything you do to it before that is borrowed against those fifteen minutes.
What to Add, and What Not To
Toasted sesame seeds, a pinch of chilli or a few torn mint leaves all belong. Feta does not, and neither does anything creamy: the salt you already used will pull water out of a dressing the same way it pulled water out of the cucumber, and the plate goes cloudy within minutes.
