Spicy Peanut Noodles with Cucumber and Chicken Rey Lopez/photo; Lisa Cherkasky/food styling, for The Washington Post If you’ve been on social media at all over the past few months, you’ve probably seen that “Cucumber Guy” in one of his many cucumber salad videos. For the uninitiated, these videos feature bleached-blond content creator Logan Moffitt slicing an entire cucumber on a mandolin into a quart-size deli container and dressing it in myriad ways, including versions based on In-N-Out’s animal style fries and jalapeño poppers. Recently, I shared my tips for how to make a better cucumber salad and included my own take on a spicy peanut version.
The salad was so good that I decided to turn it into a more filling meal by adding rice noodles and diced chicken. My tips for making a better version of Moffitt’s salads include salting the cucumber to get rid of excess moisture (so it doesn’t get watery as it sits) and using a larger container to shake the salad (to make it easier for everything to get evenly distributed). But the one change that I love the most is using the roll cut instead of a mandolin to slice the cucumber.
Not only will you be less likely to lose the tip of your finger, but the roll cut also creates better aesthetics, adding visual interest and more irregular edges to hold flavorful ingredients compared with a more uniform cut. Also known as the oblique cut, the roll cut is used for cylindrical vegetables to make similarly sized but not identi.
