I love cucumber salad. When I make it, I usually keep it super simple with just a little vinegar, salt and sugar. It’s a perfect balance of sweet and sour. However, today’s recipe is the cucumber salad from Thug Kitchen 101. It has the same sweet and sour components of my basic recipe, but with some Asian flare.

The dressing is made with rice vinegar, lime juice, soy sauce, maple syrup, olive oil and sesame oil. It has a nice mix of acidity from the vinegar and lime and richness from the oils, but it all comes together with the maple. I really like the flavour of sesame oil in salad dressings, just be sure to not use too much because then it can become overpowering.

For the salad, it’s more than just sliced cucumber. There is spinach (that I roughly chopped), red onion, cilantro and peanuts. So again, you can see the Asian influence here, sort of a Thai direction. I love all the different textures and colours. It’s so bright and fresh. Everything soaks up the flavours of the dressing really well and the onions almost start to get pickled from all the vinegar.

This is a perfect summer salad. It would be great served with any main meal, or as a topping for a quinoa/rice bowl. Another good option would be so combine this salad with some cooked rice noodles to make a scrumptious pasta salad.

The one thing about this salad is that it can’t really be made ahead of time/saved for the next day. You could make the dressing and store that in the fridge but the rest should only be cut/combined close to meal time. This keeps all the produce fresh and not soggy. If you wanted to make this for a meal prep, I would suggest keeping the dressing in a separate container and just pouring it on right before eating.

Overall, this was a very delicious cucumber salad. Will definitely make again.