Side Dishes

Creamy Cucumber Salad with Lemon and Dill

June 26, 2020 by Kristi Leave a Comment

So uniquely cool, crisp and refreshing, cucumbers are a welcome elixir on a hot sultry day. Toss them with a creamy lemon and dill vinaigrette, and you’ve got a fresh, versatile summer salad to go alongside just about anything.

This Creamy Cucumber Salad with Lemon and Dill is an updated version of a salad my mother served nearly every night during the summer. I wanted something similar to hers but with a modern, fresh feel.

creamy dill dressing in bowl with a whisk

I began by easing up on the sour cream in her recipe and adding a little extra-virgin olive oil to the mix. I swapped the distilled white vinegar for white wine vinegar and eliminated the sugar in the recipe completely. Instead of sliced onions I included a little diced shallot and added a little lemon juice and zest. This updated version of the standard Midwest cucumber salad was a real winner…light, refreshing and bright thanks to the addition of lemon.

How to Make a Great Cucumber Salad

Cucumber salads are meant to be simple, but there are a few steps that take this Creamy Cucumber Salad with Lemon and Dill from good to great:

Use English cucumbers if you can find them. Also known as seedless cucumbers, English cucumbers make an elegant salad as there is no need to cut them in half and remove the seeds first. Garden cucumbers will also work just fine in this salad, and it is really just a matter of personal preference whether or not you want to remove the seeds prior to eating them.
Salt the cucumbers to draw out some of the moisture. Cucumbers are more than 90% water. Sprinkling them with salt and letting them sit for 30 minutes or so helps draw some of that water out of the cucumber and ultimately leads to a more crisp, delicious salad. An extra step, yes, but one definitely worth taking.
Pat the cucumbers dry. Once you’ve let your salted cucumbers sit, transfer them to a baking sheet lined with paper towels or a non-terry kitchen towel. Pat them dry prior to tossing them with the vinaigrette. Again, this just ups the crisp factor in the final product.

Serving Suggestions

While this Creamy Cucumber Salad with Lemon and Dill makes an excellent side dish, it is also perfectly capable of being the star of the show. Consider topping some crispbread with a heaping spoonful of cucumber salad for lunch, or better yet, start with a bed of sliced avocado! A delicious Nordic summertime riff on avocado toast.

Creamy Cucumber Salad with Lemon and Dill on crispbread

My personal favorite way to serve this Creamy Cucumber Salad with Lemon and Dill is in a simple bowl with hearty whole grains, garden vegetables and sliced avocado. I used brown rice in my bowl, pictured below, but barley or farro would both be delicious here.

I hope you have a chance to try this Creamy Cucumber Salad with Lemon and Dill sometime soon! It’s sure to become a summertime favorite. And please let me know if you do in the comments below! I love hearing from you.

Creamy Cucumber Salad with Lemon and Dill

A deliciously simple summer salad with crisp cucumbers and a creamy lemon dill vinaigrette.

Author: Kristi
Prep Time: 35 minutes
Total Time: 35 minutes
Yield: Serves 3–4 1x
Category: salads
Cuisine: Nordic, Scandinavian
Diet: Vegetarian

Scale

Ingredients

1 large English cucumber, or 2 medium garden cucumbers, unpeeled and sliced thin (see note below)

1 ½ teaspoons coarse salt + more for seasoning

1 shallot, minced

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

2 tablespoons sour cream

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Finely grated zest of 1 lemon

1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill

Freshly ground pepper

Instructions

Transfer cucumber slices to a colander and sprinkle with salt. Toss to coat evenly Let the cucumbers sit at room temperature for about 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, make the dressing. Combine the shallot and the white wine vinegar in a medium bowl. Let sit for about 10 minutes to mellow out the shallot flavor.
Add sour cream, extra-virgin olive oil, lemon zest, lemon juice and dill to the bowl and whisk until combined.
Transfer the cucumbers to a sheet pan lined with paper towels. Pat dry.
Add the cucumbers to the vinaigrette and toss to coat. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover and chill until ready to serve. This salad is best after it has had a chance to chill for 30 minutes or so. It can be made several hours or up to a day ahead of time.

Notes

*English cucumbers are a nice choice here because they are seedless. If you are using garden cucumbers, particularly if they have large seeds, you might consider slicing them in half lengthwise and removing the seeds with a spoon prior to continuing with the recipe.

Keywords: cucumber, salad, lemon, dill, creamy, shallot, Nordic, Scandinavian, easy, simple

Herbed New Potato Salad with Pickled Golden Beets and Capers

June 13, 2020 by Kristi Leave a Comment

Herbed New Potato Salad with Pickled Beets and Capers

It is June and most definitely potato salad season! Whether you are looking for something to pair with what’s coming off the grill or are in need of something to bring to the neighborhood potluck, potato salad is often the side dish we turn to at this time of year. Traditional American potato salad is delicious with its creamy mayonnaise and mustard base, but I was looking for something a little different when I set out to create a Scandi-inspired potato salad for the blog. I began where I always do…researching what is already out there.

Lightening Up

I was pleasantly surprised to find that many of the recipes for Nordic style potato salad were tossed with a vinaigrette rather than a creamy dressing. I liked that idea…something lighter than the potato salads I have had in the past. Many also contained chopped fresh herbs which I definitely wanted in my version as well as capers for their briny punch of flavor. Things were off to a fresh and flavorful start.

Pickled Beets

Some of the older recipes I found called for pickled beets, one recipe an entire 12 ounce jar of them! While I loved the idea of pickled beets in my salad, I wanted to retain the creamy color of the potatoes themselves. That’s the trouble with beets…their brilliant color cannot be contained. They stain everything they come into contact with a lovely shade of pink. Sometimes this is a good thing, and I welcome both the flavor and the rosy hue. But since I didn’t want a pink potato salad, I figured the beets were out. But then I remembered golden beets! Why not pickle those instead of the traditional red variety and toss them with the salad? I whipped up a quick batch of my Spicy Pickled Beets using golden beets in place of the red beets. This worked perfectly. I had earthy and tangy pickled beets that didn’t turn my salad pink and brought their own gorgeous golden hue to the dish.

Tips and Tricks for Perfect Potato Salad

This potato salad is incredibly simple to put together, but I do have a few thoughts for ensuring salad perfection every time:

Slice the potatoes about 1/4 inch thick prior to cooking them. This keeps the slices clean and distinct in the final salad.
Frequently check the potatoes for doneness. This is probably the most critical piece of making this potato salad. The potatoes should be JUST tender, not falling apart. But you don’t want them crunch either. I start checking them after they’ve been simmering for about 5 minutes, and I will actually take a potato slice out, cut into it and taste it to make sure it’s just the right consistency. If they are still too crunchy, I check them again every minute or so until they are perfectly tender.
Don’t forget to save some some potato water! Using a little of the potato cooking water in the vinaigrette for this salad is a great way to bring in more potato flavor and a nice viscosity to the final product.
Dress the salad while the potatoes are warm. They will take on more flavor from the vinaigrette that way.
Toss the salad gently with a rubber spatula. These cooked potato slices are delicate and need a little extra care when tossing them to prevent them from breaking.
Season with salt and pepper to taste. Make sure you taste the salad, salt and pepper it if necessary and then taste it again. Keep doing this until you love the way it tastes. Because this potato salad contains quite a few capers which are quite salty on their own, you might need a little less salt than you normally would use.
Serve the salad warm or at room temperature. This salad is just fine straight from the fridge, but I prefer it warm just after I’ve tossed it together or I will take it out of the fridge an hour before I want to serve it so that it can come to room temperature.

The final version of this Nordic new potato salad is a real keeper. Tender slices of new potato tossed in a mustardy vinaigrette with loads of fresh herbs, shallot, capers and golden pickled beets. Pair it with grilled sausages for an easy and stunning weeknight meal or bring it to the neighbor’s backyard barbecue and listen to people ooh and ahh over your unexpected and delicious Nordic-inspired side dish. And please let me know if you give it a try in the comments below! I would love to hear what you think.