Fast Pickled Cucumber Recipe (A-Jad)

Fast Pickled Cucumber (A-Jad)

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Serves

Photo, Michael Graydon and Nikole Herriot.

Toronto chef Nuit Regular changed the way the city’s diners viewed Thai cuisine—and she hopes her new cookbook, Kiin, will do the same for how people cook it at home. “Today, the ingredients are easy to find online and at Asian supermarkets,” says Regular. And if a certain recipe seems hard, she says, just start with a simpler one: papaya salad or the starter paste for a tom yum soup. “Once you overcome the intimidation of thinking it’s hard, you’re going to find a different joy in Thai food, in making it for yourself.”

Ingredients

1/4 cup water
2 tbsp vinegar
2 tbsp Thai cane sugar
1/8 tsp sea salt
1 mini cucumber
1 fresh red spur chili
1 shallot

Instructions

In a small saucepan over medium, stir together water, white vinegar, cane sugar and salt, and bring to a boil. When the mixture is boiling, cook for another min. Set aside to cool.
Add cucumber, chili and shallot, and stir together. Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days.

The recipes in Chef Nuit Regular’s cookbook, Kiin, encompass her cooking life in restaurant kitchens and beyond: some of her restaurants’ biggest hits. The pad Thai noodles she used to make and sell in little plastic baggies for extra income as a student. The birthday curry her mother made every year. Her chicken satay skewers with pickled cucumber — the list goes on (and you’re going to want to try them all).

Read more about Chef Nuit Regular’s journey and new cookbook here.

Excerpted from Kiin by Nuit Regular. Copyright © 2020 by Nuit Regular. Photography copyright © 2020 by Michael Graydon and Nikole Herriott. Published by Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.