Gordon Ramsay's Cucumber Tip To Prevent A Soggy Salad

There are certainly a lot of fun facts floating around about the humble cucumber. (Did you know that they were once considered poisonous?) But perhaps the most well-known is that they are made up almost entirely of water — 96% water in fact, giving them the highest water content of any food. And while this certainly makes for a juicy piece of trivia (and is also what gives this vegetable its characteristically fresh profile), it can also make for a soggy salad. Therein lies the rub, because many people would say that salads simply aren't the same without them.

Enter culinary royalty and cucumber-in-salad fan, Gordon Ramsay. In addition to the many cooking tips the British chef has shared, he has also come up with a super easy technique to keep cucumbers from turning your salad into a mushy mess. Before adding it to his salads, Ramsay removes the seeds from the cucumber's core with a spoon, thereby ditching the most watery part of the vegetable while retaining its crunchier, more desirable outer flesh. Too easy.

Gordon Ramsay demonstrates the exact method for this hack in a video on his official YouTube channel; no special equipment or skills are required. After peeling an entire cucumber, he takes a small, sharp paring knife and cuts it in half lengthwise, before scooping out the seeds in the center with a standard teaspoon pulled straight from the kitchen drawer. "The teaspoon just takes out all those seeds," he explains. "So whilst it sits in the dish, it doesn't make the salad go all soft. That cucumber there is nice and crunchy," he continues as he slices the now seedless veggie into smaller pieces for use in his salad.

Nothing is stopping you from adopting this technique for other dishes that call for cucumber as well. After removing its seeds, simply cut a cucumber into smaller, thinner slices for sandwiches, or dice it into chunks and use it as part of a refreshing salsa. Cucumber also pairs particularly well with vegetables like tomatoes, meat like chicken and fish, and any other savory dish that could benefit from a little freshness and crunch.

If you want to really up the bite factor of your cucumbers and remove even more excess moisture from them, this pro-tip from celebrity chef and restaurateur Alice Waters makes use of salt and a strainer. Simple seems to be the name of the game when it comes to preparing cukes.