Cucumber Salad Ingredients

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Chef AJ and welcome to Expert Village. I'm here to show you that making healthy food can be easy, delicious and fun. Now, I'm going to make a cucumber peanut salad. You can see cucumber salads in just about every Asian restaurant. There's millions of different recipes but this one is a really simple one. It's easy to make and it's a great accompaniment if you're serving some kind of a hot Asian dish with it because it's cooling and it's refreshing and I think you're going to enjoy it. So, to start with, we have mint and mint comes like this. It's a very fragrant, fresh herb. You do really want to use fresh. Fresh is always best. If you do have to use dried, you use a third less. So if your recipe calls for three tablespoons of fresh mint, if it's dried you want to go with one. But really it does make a difference in the taste. So, all herbs pretty much come on a stem and you want to take the leaves off. I like to use one cup of firmly packed fresh mint. Now, if you really want to get technical, I weighed this and it was two ounces. If you want your cooking, especially your baking to be consistent you should always weigh things. You can get a food scale pretty inexpensively in just about any restaurant supply store. That's really if you want every recipe to come out the same but its fine if you just want to eyeball it. But, I'm using a cup of fresh mint and I'm putting it in the food processor. The reason I'm doing that is because I want it very, very fine. When you use the food processor for fresh herbs you want to make sure that the food processor is completely dry. Otherwise, it will turn your herbs to mush. A little bit longer, I want it really fine so that I'm not tasting the big leaf of mint with every bite. I want it to be distributed very well throughout the salad. So this is really, really fine. You could do it by hand. I just think it takes much longer and it really, when you food process it this way, the flavor just, and the smell just pops. So, we're going to use that in a second. But, the first thing, and most important ingredient in the cucumber salad is probably the cucumbers. I'm using three cucumbers. If you want to get technical they weighed about two pounds. I'm going to peel the cucumber. When you are using organic it's not as important, and it's always best to always use organic but certain ingredients depending on where you live you can't find. It's not always as important to peel them if they're organic. Certain things like raspberries and strawberries, very delicate things without a peel, it's really really important to always buy organic. Other things such as a banana or a coconut, where it's got a hard skin, it's not quite as bad if you can't find organic in that. We're not using the peel just because in this recipe it just doesn't taste quite as good.

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