We love this carrot and cucumber salad with maple tahini dressing because it’s colorful, healthy, and filling. Plus it’s a 5 minute salad! What more could you want? Nothing. Make it today!
This is a carrot cucumber salad. We’re not going to pretend it’s not a simple recipe. But it’s a good salad with a nice variety of textures and a great maple tahini dressing. So here it is.
Ingredients
The inspiration for this salad was a box full of purple carrots at our local market. They were an impulse buy, but a worthy one. Purple carrots are way more interesting than orange carrots, and this inspired Sarah to actually eat them (as opposed to that bag of regular, boring carrots that’s been sitting in the fridge a few weeks).
PS – we recently learned of the connection between the place we call home and the now ubiquitous orange carrot…
< Like carrot salads? Try our Polish-Inspired Carrot Apple Slaw >
It’s also the beginning of what they call cucumber time here in The Netherlands. So now we’ve got cucumbers and carrots as the veggie base for this salad. To add additional textures, flavors, and heft, in go chickpeas, feta cheese, and cilantro.
Of course the dressing also adds a ton of tasty flavor to this salad. It’s a maple tahini dressing, so you can probably guess what’s in it. In addition to the named ingredients, you’ve got soy sauce (we prefer dark), rice wine vinegar, and mirin. So this is an Asian-Middle Eastern fusion dressing and we love it.
< Like maple dressings? Try our Beet Salad with Maple Lime Dressing >
Recipe tips
You may not need tips to make a salad. And more power to you. But we’ve got some anyway.
For both texture and time (we like that this is a 5 minute salad), we cut the cucumber and carrot into bite-sized chunks.
When making the maple tahini dressing, it will come together most easily by starting with the tahini. Spoon it into a small bowl and then slowly incorporate the liquid ingredients into it one by one.
You don’t have to worry about anything wilting with this salad, so feel free to toss the veg and the chickpeas with the dressing whenever you want. We do that first and then top with the feta, salt, pepper, and cilantro right before serving. You may want to hold off on the salt until after you taste the salad. Feta and soy sauce are both salty so you may not even need it.
< Like salads with feta? Try our Beetroot and Feta Salad >
Eet smakelijk!
Carrot and Cucumber Salad with Maple Tahini Dressing
We love this carrot and cucumber salad with maple tahini dressing because it's colorful, healthy, and filling. Plus it's a 5 minute salad! What more could you want? Nothing. Make it today!
Ingredients
Carrot and Cucumber Salad
- 1 large carrot, washed and/or peeled
- 1 large cucumber
- 1/2 cup chickpeas, drained and rinsed
Maple Tahini Dressing
- 2 tsp tahini
- 2 tsp rice wine vinegar
- 2 tsp mirin
- 1/2 tsp dark soy sauce
- 1/2 tsp maple syrup
- 1/8 dried ginger powder
Toppings
- 1/8-1/4 cup feta, crumbled
- Pinch of salt, to taste
- Fresh cracked black pepper, to taste
- Small bunch of cilantro
Instructions
- Cut carrot and cucumber into bite-sized chunks and put in a large bowl with the chickpeas.
- Make the tahini dressing by first spooning out the tahini into a small bowl and then slowly incorporating the other ingredients.
- Pour the dressing over the veg/chickpeas and mix.
- Top with as much crumbled feta, salt, pepper, and cilantro leaves as you want.
Notes
- As noted, toppings can be customized per your taste. For what it's worth, we like about a 1/4 cup of feta, a lot of freshly cracked black pepper, just a pinch of salt, and just a few leaves of cilantro.
- Honey can be substituted for maple syrup (although then it's no longer a vegan tahini dressing).
