A super easy Chinese smashed cucumber salad made with basic ingredients including salt, sugar, garlic, vinegar, sesame oil, and chili oil. It can be super delicious even with only 5 minutes of preparation. This is one of the most popular homemade cold dishes in China throughout the year.
Cucumbers are really great for summer. The excellent and crispy taste can help us against the hot weather. There are many cold dishes in China that are equal to salads in the western centuries but this smashed cucumber salad is always the best choice for either quick dishes or large dinners. It is called “凉拌黄瓜” in Chinese meaning: “cold cucumber salad“.
Unpickled version VS pickled version
Elaine has two ways of making easy Chinese cucumber salad: one is to smash it directly before mixing and the other one is to pickle the cucumber for around 15 minutes with salt to remove extra water content. The unpickled version is much quicker and delicious. While the pickled version gets a more crisper texture and is less fresh in taste. Smashed cucumber can absorb more sauce within the cucumber, resulting in a compound and uniform taste. However, pickled cucumber salad has two layers of taste. The first is the combined sauce, which succeeded with a crispy and freshness from the cucumber slices. I strongly recommend you try both ways if you love cucumber salad the same as me.
Do I need to remove the skins?
For the cucumber, pick fresh ones and just peel the thick skin off and remain thin skin, which can help to add some extra green color and also make the smashed cucumber crisper. If you really do not like the skin, you can peel them all off. Do remember to cut the two ends off. Or if you use organic small cucumber, keep the skins and just remove the two ends.
Why smash the cucumber?
One of the key tips for this Chinese-style cucumber salad is to smash the cucumber with a wide knife. Smashing will create enough space inside the cucumber, helping the flavors and sauce permeate.
The variations
There are lots of variations of Chinese cucumber salad. This is the very basic and simplest version which doesn’t need a pickled process. The mashed cucumber can be simply served with sesame oil and garlic, a more savory version by adding light soy sauce, or a hot and sour version by adding chili oil and vinegar. Or sometimes, we match the mashed cucumber with other ingredients perfect for cold dishes too like wood ear mushrooms.
Instructions
Step 1: Prepare Your Cucumber
Wash the cucumber well and trim off the tough skins. For long Enough cucumber, peel off half of the skin and let the remaining add some green colors. Or if you are using organic small cucumber, peel only the skin around 5cm from the two ends. Then cut off the two ends.
Step 2: Smash
Put them onto a larger cutting board and get a wide knife, cut the cucumber lengthwise. Place skin side up and use your knife to smash the cucumber.
Step 3: Cut them into smaller pieces
Add the cucumber into small pieces and transfer to a serving bowl.
Step 4 – Add garlic
chop garlic, finely chop the garlic and place them on top of the cucumber.
Step 5: Add the sauces.
- Basic sauce – salt, sugar (optional), and sesame oil.
- With light soy sauce and black vinegar
- With light soy sauce, black vinegar and chili oil
The light version with only sesame oil, salt, and sugar can be super fresh if you get a high-quality fresh cucumber. Sugar is optional.
If you want to make this more savory and strong in flavor, add light soy sauce and black vinegar.
For a spicy cucumber salad, add chili oil to make this extremely delicious.
Recommended Chinese-style salad for hot summer
- wood ear mushroom salad–the spicy and sour version I love the most.
- Bean thread noodles salad with carrots and spinach–a healthy vegan salad
- Sichuan-style eggplant salad with fresh chilis
What to serve with smashed cucumber salad
This cold cucumber salad can match extremely well with almost all savory braised dishes or stir-frying as a side dish. The top choices include: mapo tofu, red braised pork belly, twice cooked pork belly, and Hunan beef stir fry.
Chinese Cucumber Salad
Ingredients
- 1 fresh English cucumber , or two smaller ones, around 350g
- 3 garlic cloves , mashed and then chopped
- 1/4 tsp. sugar , optional
- salt to taste
- 1 tbsp. sesame oil
- 1 tbsp. light soy sauce , optional
- 1 tsp. black vinegar , optional
- 1 ~2 tsp. chili oil to taste , optional
Instructions
- For long English cucumber, wash the cucumber and peel off tough skins. For small cucumber, remove the two ends.
- Smash with a wide kitchen knife (like Chinese slicing knife) until the cucumber is well crushed. Then cut into one bite pieces.
- Transfer all cucumber cubes into a bowl. Mix well with mashed garlic, salt and sugar.
- Or further add light soy sauce and vinegar to make a more strong version.
- Or add chili oil for a hot version.
Notes
Nutrition
That’s a really interesting technique-crushing the cucumber. I will have to give it a try.
Hi Sherri,
Thanks for stopping by and commenting. Hope you like it.
Hi Elaine,
Great recipe. I used the smashed cucumber method and it turned out great. So easy and simple to make. It took me about 3 minutes start to finish plus the 15 minutes in the fridge. The salt released a decent amount of water from the cucumber during the fridge time and that, mixed with vinegar and seseme oil, made a nice, light and fresh dressing for the salad. I’ve had this dish in many places in China but this was one of my favorites so far – fresh makes everything better.
Thanks Zhou for your feedback. This is one of my favorite in summer days. I like the cool version with some water released. Glad to know that you like it too.
hi,
we love a salad we have had often in china that has tmoatoes, smashed cucumbers, garlic, ginger, black vinegar, shoyu, sesame oil, sesame seeds, chili, etc. i sounds kind of like fah huang gua. how should it be spelled? thanks so much!
Hi Margaret,
Is it Da Ban Cai? Where do you had this dish? I mean which province or what type of restaurants?
Thank you for a fantastic site! I love good Asian food and as these canned saucesand precooked dishes are often tasteless and boring I have been looking for authentic and good recipes to try in my own kitchen. I will shortly test you recipe for steamed buns and crispy pork belly 🙂
Thanks Jenni for leaving me this note. Home-made Chinese dishes usually provide wonderful tastes. That’s a really wonderful idea to make them at home rather than resort to canned food. And you picked two challenging recipes. Good luck and happy cooking ahead.
Hi Elaine,
When I lived in Hebei, I asked my friends to teach me to make this. Your recipe is very similar to theirs except for one thing: After they cut the cucumber, they mix it with some salt and let it sit for about 15 minutes. Then they squeeze some of the liquid out of the cucumbers and get rid of the extra liquid. It helps the cucumbers absorb the sauce. BTW, your pork belly recipe was amazing and I used it to make a Thai dish with Crispy Pork Belly and Chinese Broccoli!
Hi Nick,
That’s also a popular method. You can use both ways. Personally for this smashed cucumber, I just mix seasonings directly without squeezing the water out because it is smashed already. Smashing is used for the purpose of better absorbing of the sauce. And thanks for your feedback. I LOVE crispy pork belly too. Happy cooking and enjoy!
Good salad! I will be making it again. You didn’t say anything about stopping the cucumber splattering the kitchen during the smashing process though. I wonder if I got a messy bench and walls because I used an thin-skinned cucumber? It was the same size and shape as what you are calling an English cucumber (says this Aussie whose lived in the States and grew up when Aussie food was English food) but I don’t know the varietal name. Too short for Lebanese cucumber. OK, bench and walls wiped down now, salad digesting…
Haha Ann,
What an mess! In fact, I do not know the exact name of this cucumber too. It is not native in China. I used to splatter on the operating board of my kitchen and the walls but then I tried to use a large Chinese style slicing knife, which is really wide. So it really helps a lot!
OK, I’ve got one of those knives hidden in a kitchen drawer. Now I know what to use it for!
Great!
Ate this in Beijing and really love it. Thanks for sharing
It is really yummy and easy to make. I serve it a lot as a side dish for summer.
Could you tell me the calories for this?
Hi Robin,
Sorry I did not figure out the calories for this recipe.
Regular or Toasted sesame oil?
Toasted sesame oil.
OMG this is full-on *amazing*.
I had a cucumber salad like this in an amazing Chinese restaurant, and have been trying for years to get the sauce right. This is it!
I added cashew nuts to it, because that’s how the restaurant did it, and it makes this salad a light meal for me.
One question–in China do you use fresh new garlic, or older garlic? The reason I asked is that the Americans eating this thought the garlic was too strong. I like it strong, but when cooking this for others I’ll need to leave the garlic out and let people put it in themselves. I’m wondering if maybe in China you are using a milder form of garlic than what we usually have here?
Thanks again, Elaine, for all your awesome recipes.
L.
Hi,
We use older garlic. And they have strong tastes too. After harvested, we hang the garlic so they can be dried by air. After the process, the taste becomes quite strong.
Been wanting this recipe.
This dish is one of my favourites from when I was living in Beijing. Thank you!
Thanks you!