A dip that’s cool as a cucumber
Last summer, I had such a windfall of homegrown cucumbers that I began shoving them in the mailbox as a gift for the mail carrier.
This year’s planting hasn’t been nearly as prolific, so I’ve been a bit more mindful about how best to prepare them. Gazpacho, pickles and cucumber salad are easy and tasty, but I wanted to do something
unexpected with this limited crop of cukes.
Culinarian Elizabeth Heiskell offers a cooling cucumber dip in her latest cookbook, “Come on Over! Southern Delicious for Every Day and Every Occasion” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30). The recipe is a simple mix of cucumber pulp; dairy staples sour cream, Greek yogurt and mayonnaise; dill, garlic, salt and pepper for seasoning; and hits of vinegar and lemon
juice for acid. But simple can be sublime.
“I beg you to try this knockout,” she writes in the headnote. Besides serving the chilled dip with crudits and crostini (or just grab a bag of tortilla chips as I did), she suggests pairing it with lamb, cold-poached salmon or even hamburgers and hot dogs.
Heiskell calls for the cucumbers to be peeled before processing them, but if you’ve got unwaxed organic cucumbers, you don’t have to discard those long green strips. Mads Refslund, who co-founded famed NOMA restaurant in Denmark with Rene Redzepi, proposes giving peels a second life in his ode to trash cooking, “Scraps, Wilt & Weeds: Turning Wasted Food Into Plenty” (Grand Central Publishing, 2017). Brine and time (three to five days) are all it takes for cucumber peels to become sour enough to add to a banh mi, burger or Reuben.