Chinese Cucumber Salad | 拍黄瓜 | Easy Chinese Cooking

Another super simple Chinese side dish today and one that is phenomenally popular all around China. Cucumbers in black vinegar. Now there are a lot of variations to this dish but essentially what it is, it's kind of half a pickle half a salad. It's cucumbers dressed with black vinegar. This is a vinegar made from glutinous rice. It's kind of got this savory sweet sour taste to it and even though there are lots of different ingredients that you can put into this, you've got to keep your eye on the price. You've got to stay focused. Cucumbers and black vinegar is what the dish is and I'll talk through some of these other ingredients and why we're using them because that's really important not just for this dish but for your understanding of Chinese cooking too. I'm going to start with this. This is black fungus. It's a wood ear mushroom. It's just a really popular dried fungus or dried mushroom in Chinese cooking. We're using a little bit of that, just a tablespoon of the dried stuff and we're going to cover that with plenty of hot water. It's important to use quite a lot of hot water here for a couple of reasons. Firstly, these will expand. They'll take up a lot more room than what we've got. That's why I've got in quite a big bowl but also you want the water not just to rehydrate it but to slightly cook it as well, to sort of tenderize it not just through putting water into it but also that heat from the hot water. So the more hot water, the more it'll retain heat, the more soft these wood ear funguses will be when they go in. Our other ingredients, just some tomato. Now here is what I think is really important for Chinese cuisine. It's something that I think has led a lot of people down the garden path. We're putting tomatoes in this but you could also put chilies. We're putting wood ear fungus in here but you could also leave that out. The reason we're putting these actually goes probably deeper into Chinese culture and how Chinese culture relates to cooking. We're putting these in here, the garlic, the tomatoes and the wood ear fungus to add color to this dish. In Chinese cooking there are five elements. There are five colors and there are five tastes. The five tastes, salty, sweet, sour, bitter and spicy. The five colors are green, red, black, yellow and white. Generally when you're cooking Chinese food, in order for it to look good in the Chinese food mentality, it's got to have a mix of those colors. We're using green and slightly yellow cucumbers here. We're going to put some white garlic in there, some red tomatoes and some black fungus. That's going to give us the spread of those five colors. Now this is something that is really important because we could substitute chilies for this. We could put some onion in or shallot instead of the garlic here. Some sesame seeds, black sesame seeds instead of these. There's lots of different variations and I think this has led people to a real misconception about Chinese food. You see these stir-fried dishes that have a couple of different colors thrown in there and people think that you've got to use 20 ingredients to make a stir-fry. What it is, is a very simple dish that's had a couple of little accents. This is essentially a sprig of parsley that you would get on a steak or something in western cuisine. Give it some freshness and brightness and that's what these red tomatoes and black fungus and white garlic are doing in this dish. But at its core, it's not a tomato and fungus and garlic and cucumber salad. It's a cucumber salad with black vinegar. So keep the dish about its core which is cucumbers and black vinegar and then you add just a touch of these other ingredients in as a garnish essentially to make it look like a healthy and complete dish. If you don't have black fungus, leave it out. Don't ask me for a substitute, just leave it out. If you don't want to put tomatoes in there, leave them out. You can put chili instead or you can leave that out too. Enough talking, let's get into it. Now for our cucumbers, we can just leave them just as is. You know we can just break these up with the skin on. I personally prefer just to take a touch of the skin off, just changes the texture a little. So not all of the skin, just in strips like this and you've got the best of both worlds. Now you can slice the cucumbers. I personally prefer them to be a bit more rough. So I'm gonna bash them. Just cover them with a tea towel. You don't have to do this but bashing cucumbers can make them go everywhere. Get a mallet and that looks pretty good. Now we can just break this up with fingers a little bit more. Just cut those rough ends off and all of that straight into a bowl. Now I need to season these quite well with salt. About a quarter teaspoon of salt, not too much because we're adding some soy sauce to this for some umami lift as well. But just a bit of salt to start to draw the liquid out of the cucumbers. You notice I'm not straining it because I do want the liquid in there. You know the liquid is actually forming a fairly integral part of the dressing for these cucumbers. So a bit of salt to get it started, maybe a touch of sugar as well and we'll leave that for a couple of minutes to start to draw the moisture out. This black fungus looks pretty good and it's nice and tender now. What we need to do is just cut out the root of the fungus, the thing that attaches the fungus there. You've got these kind of areas around the outside there but this can be a little bit tough. So I want to cut that out just using a pair of scissors. The wood ear can go in just as is, our tomato as well and garlic too. Now we've got to dress the salad. Our seasonings for this, black vinegar, soy sauce, we've already added the salt and sugar and some sesame oil. Now you could use rice vinegar for this as well, you could use MSG instead of soy sauce or some fish sauce if you wanted to. But I'm going to keep this vegetarian or vegan and instead of sesame oil you could use chili oil, any kind of kind of flavoured oil there. The main component is the black vinegar, so a couple of teaspoons of that, about a teaspoon of soy sauce, another one of sesame oil. Give that a nice stir. Let's give that a taste now. It's very nice. One thing I do want to add is just a touch of cold water to this because if you want a stronger flavour, leave it just as it is. But I think for a side dish or a vegetable dish, I don't think you need it to be overpoweringly flavourful. Think about sort of eating your way across a Chinese meal where everything is really strongly flavoured, it just kind of knocks the balance out. So if you're coming off eating a really strong kind of heavily flavoured dish, you want something that's a little bit more mellow in flavour to kind of cleanse the palate a bit and that's what a dish like this can do. So a touch of water into the dressing, it's actually going to help it be a more balanced dish. Throw out onto a serving plate, including the dressing as well. This is quite a liquidy dish and that's it. A very simple cold dish of cucumbers in black vinegar.