Smacked Cucumber in Garlicky Sauce

The easiest dish to make from my Every Grain of Rice dinner was the smacked cucumber in garlicky sauce (suan ni pai huang gua / 蒜泥拍黃瓜).  

Finished dish of smacked cucumbers

The ingredients for this dish were (prices in parentheses):

Cucumbers ($0.83)

Salt ($0)

Garlic ($0.20)

Sugar ($0)

Light soy sauce ($1.99 for the bottle, but probably only used about $0.15)

Chinkiang vinegar ($1.29 for the bottle, but probably only used about $0.10)

Chili oil ($2.59 for the bottle, but probably only used about $0.25)

Ground roasted Sichuan pepper ($0)

Some of the ingredients - forget you saw the chili bean paste here...

A tasty cold dish for under $2, when you count the fractional amounts of the oils and vinegar. We didn't have most of these ingredients in the pantry when we started, but now that we do, I know we will keep using them so I'm comfortable not treating the whole bottle as the cost (unlike some other things that we never end up using again). I suppose if you wanted to eat this on its own as a meal you would need a lot more cucumbers, but I think it would still be a pretty inexpensive dish.

Process:

The first step was to roast and grind up the Sichuan peppercorns. This was used more in the ma po tofu, but since this dish is coming up first on the blog, I'll talk about it here.

Ground roasted Sichuan pepper

A's mom left us with a bag of Sichuan peppercorns awhile ago that we never had a chance to use until now. We heated them on the stove, cooled them, and then ground them up with our mortar and pestle. It was fun and took so much less time than I thought it would. They weren't as spicy or numbing as I thought they would be either, but maybe that's because they're a bit aged. Or maybe I didn't heat them long enough on the stove?

Next, clean the cucumbers and smack them with a knife before chopping them into diagonal slices. These are all different shapes because A smacked one cucumber and I did the other, and he has just a bit more force than I do. A bit more smashing was involved. The cucumbers sit in salt for a little bit and then you drain them.

After that, it's basically just combining the other ingredients in a bowl and then adding the cucumbers. Simple!

Review:

This was a good cucumber dish - light, crunchy and refreshing. A often makes a different Chinese cucumber dish - one that uses soy sauce, sugar, vinegar and garlic as its base. The major difference here was the addition of chili oil and Sichuan peppercorn which gave it a nice spicy flavor. Both are good, just slightly different. The spiciness of the cucumbers here also complimented the ma po tofu pretty well.

I think we would make this again. It's really easy since we now have everything on hand except for cucumbers!