: : Granny’s Cooking : Pickled Cucumber : :
After reading Josh’s posting on the cucumber salad he made, I got hungry thinking of Granny’s pickled cucumber salad. Oooh! It’s very nice on a hot day and I can just eat it with rice alone.
First, she cut up a whole cucumber and one onion. Put them in a bowl and mixed it up with 1/2 teaspoon of salt to dehydrate the cucumber i.e. remove the water. She let it rest there for about an hour. Note that the cucumbers found in Asia is different from the ones in Western Countries. In Asia, one has to cut off the tip of the cucumber and start rubbing the top portion on the cut section of the remaining cucumber to remove the sap (which makes the cucumber very bitter). The sap will start foaming at the top so cut off this part once the foam stops getting bigger.
Next, she chopped some chillis. Gentling moving the chillis to the side of the chopping board with the knife, she separated most of the chilli seeds from the cut chilli. Make sure that the knife is only touching the chilli and not the chopping board. The chilli seeds is the one that makes the chilli really hot.
Then, she poured out the water coming out of the cucumber and the onions. Put the chillis in after this.
The vinegar that she uses is the Rice Vinegar from China. Not sure whether it can be found in Chinse Grocery Shops in Western Countries but no harm trying. Else use malt vinegar. Granny doesn’t recommend using local vinegar as it’s mostly pure acetic acid which will cause bad gas strict problems. She’s of the opinion that the China-made Rice Vinegar is made purely from rice.
She poured in about 2 tablespoon of vinegar to the cucumber, onions and chopped chillis.
Next, she mixed about 2 tablespoon (!!!) of sugar into the salad and mixed everything time. Then it goes into the fridge to be chilled for half an hour.
The finished product. Yum! I can eat this with rice only. For today, I had it with lemang @ glutinous rice that was cooked in bamboo.