This Simple Freezer Trick Is the Secret to Better Cucumber Salad

Some of chef Matt Atkinson’s formative food memories took place during big family gatherings in Yazoo City, Mississippi, where his dad’s side of the family is from. Everyone would congregate at the home of his great-great-grandmother Pauline Jackson, affectionately known to all as Little Mamaw.

The feasts’ centerpiece might be fried chicken, catfish, or thick-cut rib eyes from the grocery store in town. But one side dish was always at the table: Little Mamaw’s cucumber salad, made with sliced cucumbers that she tenderized in the freezer and Vidalia onions soused in store-bought Italian dressing. 

“It was one of those things she always had dressed and ready in the fridge,” says Atkinson, chef de cuisine at The Patterson House in Nashville. “I heard her refer to it as ‘icebox salad.’” 

The softened cukes absorbed the sharp dressing and sweet piquancy of the onions without leaching water into the salad and diluting it. Atkinson, whose menu at The Patterson House features a version of Jackson’s salad alongside fried North Carolina catfish, is almost certain Little Mamaw didn’t know the science behind the freezing hack — simply that it made her go-to salad sing. 

“I’m pretty sure if I had asked her, ‘Why do you freeze the cucumbers? What’s the science behind it?’ she’d say, ‘I don’t know, that’s what my mom told me to do,’ or ‘That’s what my neighbor does with her salad,’” he says. “She knew what she was doing without knowing what she was doing.” 

Why the freezer trick works

Because most fruits and vegetables are more than 90 percent water, freezing turns that internal water into expanding ice crystals. As those crystals form, they rupture cell walls, softening firm flesh and creating pockets that soak up dressing — all without significantly degrading nutrients.

“You see a lot of people doing smashed cucumbers these days,” Atkinson says. “Freezing does a similar thing to the cell structure, but you’re not beating up the produce, so you can keep a nice, pretty sliced cucumber.”

Once thawed, the ruptured cells release excess water, concentrating flavor and allowing marinades to penetrate. If you simply tossed raw sliced cucumber into a seasoned marinade, the salt would draw out the moisture, leaving the salad waterlogged and diluted. 

This technique works best on firm-skinned, water-dense produce, like cucumbers and summer squash. Atkinson has found that some stubbornly chewy proteins, like razor clams, also benefit from a quick turn in the freezer. 

How to do it at home

At The Patterson House, Atkinson slices long, slender unagi cucumbers, lays them out on paper towels, and freezes them just until they firm up, 15 to 30 minutes. At home, put your frozen cucumbers in your marinade or dressing of choice, then allow them to thaw in the refrigerator until just before serving. Slice thickness is hotly debated in The Patterson House kitchen, and depends on how long the cukes will sit in the marinade. If making them a day in advance, as Little Mamaw often did, you can slice them up to three-quarters of an inch thick. 

Atkinson naturally doctored the dressing up, too, “which in my mind was probably French’s Italian,” he says. His version combines extra-virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar, dried basil, parsley, oregano, chile flakes, Aleppo pepper, Dijon mustard, and confited garlic. He pours it over the frozen cucumbers and sliced, sweet Vidalia onions. 

One bite of icebox salad instantly transports Atkinson back to that house set in the gateway to the Mississippi Delta, where food science often revealed itself as a happy accident. 

“Little Mamaw lived to be 100, so I was lucky enough to have gotten into my profession when she was still around, and I could ask her questions and really pick her brain,” says Atkinson. “I use her spoons and cast-iron pans; I have a lot of her written recipes. Those tricks and techniques, it’s so cool that they’ve been passed down. Now we get to learn the science behind them.”