Before Adding Cucumbers To Salad You Must Consider This Important Step

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Chop up some cucumber and you've got a fresh and colorful way to vitalize any salad. Sounds good, right? Here's the thing, though — you can't count on your cucumber to mingle with your other ingredients in a pleasant way. You don't want a bland salad, or a soggy one where a dry one should be. With this in mind, Chowhound spoke with Rosie Kellett about how she approaches this cucumber conundrum.

Kellett, author of the new cookbook "In for Dinner," suggests considering whether you should de-seed your cucumbers before adding them to your salad. Much like how Gordon Ramsay opts to de-seed cucumbers, Kellett is certainly not against the practice. But when asked directly if she thinks you should always do this, she gave a little more nuance. "[It] totally depends on the salad you're making and what you're going for," she states. "The seeds in cucumbers contain a lot of water and can make a salad slightly soggy, which is not always what you want. On the other hand, they can soak up a lot of flavor, so if you are making a wetter salad with a flavorful dressing, then I tend to leave them in." There are also other ways to add some extra crunch to your cucumbers, but as Kellett says, you may not want that in every salad you make — so make that call and prep your cucumbers accordingly.

In essence, if you want a crisp, crunchy salad, de-seeding your cucumbers may be best, whereas a "wet" salad could actually benefit from the seeds' presence. To use Rosie Kellett's example, "If I were making a Chinese-inspired smashed cucumber salad, I would leave the seeds in to soak up all of the dressing; it's a wet salad and I would probably serve it with rice, which again soaks up the dressing, so here the seeds can stay." For a drier dish meant to feature more crunch, such as a Middle Eastern-style couscous salad, Kellett says she would remove the cucumber seeds to avoid sogging up the couscous. The firmness of diced cucumber is what you'd want in this dish — not the cucumbers' moisture.

But the story doesn't end there — you've also got to consider the variety of cucumber. Cucumber varieties aren't as interchangeable as you might think, and not only do they differ in taste, but they also vary in how seed-laden they are. "There is a delicious kind of Italian cucumber that barely has any seeds, tastes almost like melon," Kellett states. "I would never de-seed these. I also really enjoy the seeds in little Persian cucumbers, but the larger classic cucumber that you find in the supermarket is quite watery and can benefit from de-seeding in the right context." So choose wisely, find the proper cucumber/salad combo, and make the most of your fresh ingredients.