THE CUCUMBER SALAD SECRET
‘I’ll give you the recipe but then I’ll have to kill you,” said Emma Chen with a big smile when I asked the owner of Red Chamber for her cucumber salad recipe on behalf of a reader a couple of years ago. It is the most delicious salad. Ask any Red Chamber regular and the cucumber salad is bound to feature high up on their list of favourites. But getting the recipe is akin to unravelling the Da Vinci code. So simple, but what’s the secret?
With the Hyde Park, Sandton, restaurant celebrating its 30th anniversary, it was time to find out and so we decided for fun that I would make what I thought was Red Chamber’s version and put it to Chen for the ultimate test, the taste test.
“Every household makes it in a different way, ” she said politely, deftly picking up a couple of cucumber cubes with her chopsticks. I watched anxiously as she chewed, her expression not giving away a thing.
“Both salads are delicious,” she said, referring to the
Red Chamber original, gleaming nuggets of cold cucumber with just the right amount of chilli and garlic, and mine, which to my eye was looking a little on the pale side. The dressing had puddled at the bottom of the salad and the sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds was way too generous.
My turn to sample. No surprise, Red Chamber’s cucumber salad was as delicious as ever and mine was the poor relative. But that didn’t stop Chen bringing out the big guns, the father of the cucumber salad, the Tiger Tiger, a delicious mound of grated cucumber with the skin on and a good helping of chilli and garlic. Yum.
As generous as ever, Chen shared a few clues to the perfect cucumber salad.
“Choose young cucumbers with a narrow waist,” she said. The skin should be covered in lots of little bumps and preferably still have the flower attached, “which means it was picked that morning.”
The cucumber, she said, should be taken from the fridge, sliced just before serving ice cold. And no rice vinegar!