Why You Ought to Salt Your Cucumbers

Come summertime, cooks and residential cooks all over the place are significantly excited—like, truly excited—about tomatoes. Tomato tarts, sandwiches, and pastas galore! Whereas we are going to’t deny that tomatoes are good, there’s moreover moderately rather a lot to love about their summer season salad sidekick, the cucumber. Cucumbers, which ship coolness, crunch, and a refreshing chunk to salads, sandwiches, and even stir-fries, can truly make your summer season meals pop. Plus, they’re delicious to snack on with a dip or on their very personal. Nevertheless on account of cucumbers are full of moisture, they’re going to flip your meals proper right into a soggy, waterlogged mess. Thankfully for us, there’s a straightforward decision to this downside: salting your cucumbers.

Why You Should Salt Your Cucumbers

Salting your cucumbers initiates the strategy of osmosis, which expels water from the cucumber’s cells whereas concurrently enhancing its style. As Extreme Eats contributor Tim Chin wrote in his data to brining greens, the salt “diffuses all through these membranes and seasons the greens deeply.” People often contemplate cucumbers as bland and watery, nonetheless counting on the variability, they’re usually sweet, pleasantly bitter, and even savory. Salt helps cucumbers launch their moisture, nonetheless, merely as importantly, highlights the nuanced flavors we might in every other case miss.

It’s a technique our editors and contributors rely upon. “As soon as I make cucumber dips, I on a regular basis pre-salt cucumbers to draw out moisture sooner than stirring into the dip, so the excess moisture doesn’t skinny the dip as a result of it leaches out over time,” says senior culinary editor Leah Colins.

Culinary editor Genevieve Yam, who despises a soggy salad, incessantly salts her cucumbers to forestall her meals from becoming a puddle. And Chin employs this technique in his stir-fried cucumbers and mushroom recipe to help the cucumbers accurately sear in its place of turning into mush.

Discover ways to Salt Your Cucumbers

You have acquired heard of “set it and neglect it,” nonetheless what about…salt it and neglect it? Salting your cucumbers is such a low effort job that each one it is important to do is season them, stroll away, and let osmosis do the exhausting provide the outcomes you need. Do it at the beginning of dinner prep, and by the purpose you’ve got acquired gathered your whole mise en place, your cucumbers will possible have the ability to go.

You’ll want to make use of about half a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt for every pound of cucumbers you’re preparing. (Use 1 / 4 teaspoon if using desk salt.) Wash and slice the cucumbers, place them in a colander set over an enormous bowl or sink, then salt them. (It is potential you may must frivolously toss them to make sure the cucumbers are evenly coated) Let the cucumbers sit until they begin to launch their water, about 5 to 10 minutes. Some people want to rinse the salt off or dab the cucumbers dry afterwards, nonetheless whether or not or not you choose to is completely as a lot as you. For many who do rinse them, merely be sure to empty them correctly so you aren’t together with way more water to your final dish after working to remove moisture—on account of which may defeat the whole operate of salting them inside the first place.