Radish and Sesame Soy Noodle Salad

This is another recipe from Ching He-Huang's Chinese Food Made Easy. I love noodle salads and I normally don't mind radishes so I thought I'd give this a try. Plus, it gave me the opportunity to use the bottle of black rice vinegar sitting unopened in my pantry.

Well, I loved the dressing and I loved the taste of the noodles with the dressing. I couldn't toss the salad to evenly distribute everything to save my life, but I managed with some creative serving. I didn't love the radish. I've only ever served radish sliced pretty thinly and these large wedges were just too sharp to work with the salad. I think that radishes you are meant to use in this salad should be sweeter, but my radishes were anything but sweet. In hindsight, I probably should have tried one before I chopped them all up, but I've never had a radish that could qualify as tasting sweet so I never realised that there are ones like that out there. Hindsight research is 20/20. I probably could have saved it by retrieving the radish chunks and slicing them thinly, but it was too much work. Luckily, my poor tossing skills meant I could retrieve a majority of the noodles, so I ended up just eating noodles and dressing. Both are very tasty.

Radish and Sesame Soy Noodle Salad
from Chinese Food Made Easy by Ching He-Huang

200g cooked whole wheat noodles or cooked brown rice, drizzled with groundnut oil
200g red radish, washed and quartered
½ cucumber, halved lengthways, deseeded and diced
1 small handful of black sesame seeds or toasted sesame or health seeds
fresh coriander sprigs to garnish

For the sesame soy dressing

3 tablespoons light soy sauce
3 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
3 tablespoons chinkiang black rice vinegar or balsamic vinegar

Prepare the noodles, radishes and cucumber and place in the fridge to chill for at least 1 hour.
Combine all the ingredients for the dressing in a bowl.
To serve, place the noodles in a large dish, layer with some radish and cucumber and scatter over the black sesame seeds. Spoon the dressing over the dish, garnish with coriander sprigs and serve immediately.

Thanks to a huge backlog of posts, the posting of this recipe has been a little delayed. It was originally made in December 2009.