This easy cucumber, onion, and tomato salad is perfect for a warm summer day.
There’s a lot to love about this top-rated cucumber tomato salad recipe. It’s inexpensive to make using everyday ingredients, it’s a crisp and refreshing side dish that goes with just about anything, and it has make-ahead convenience built right in. Let’s dive into this dish and see why Allrecipes home cooks award it a solid 5-stars.
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How to Make Cucumber Tomato Salad
This recipe for Marinated Cucumber, Onion, and Tomato Salad has most of the ingredients right there in the title. Cool, crisp cucumbers and juicy ripe tomatoes are teamed up with onions in a satisfying mix of flavor and texture. But what pulls this dish together is the tart and tangy salad dressing made of water, vinegar, oil, sugar, salt, and pepper.
It takes only 15 minutes to prep the salad itself: Whisk the ingredients for the dressing, peel and slice the cucumbers, cut the tomatoes into wedges, slice the onion into rings, and place everything together in a bowl. After that, it goes into the refrigerator to marinate for at least two hours so the dressing can work its magic to enhance and balance all the flavors. That marination step means you can make this salad well ahead of time and stash it in the fridge until you’re ready to dish it up.
What Does a Cucumber Tomato Salad Contain?
Cucumbers
Choose firm cucumbers with smooth, firm skins and no soft spots. Cucumbers lose water quickly after they’re picked and will start to show shrinking and wrinkling if they’ve been in storage for too long.
Tomatoes
This recipe doesn’t specify what kind of tomatoes to use, but you’ll want to choose the ripest, tastiest tomatoes you can find. Heirloom tomatoes have the best flavor, but unless you grow them yourself, they can be pricier than the everyday tomatoes from your supermarket. You can use cherry tomatoes or Roma tomatoes, too. Whichever tomato variety you choose, get the best you can afford because the flavor of the tomatoes play a starring role. If you do use smaller tomatoes, be sure to slice them so the marinade can soak in and do its work.
Onions
You can use any onion you like for this recipe: yellow, white, or red. Each brings a different flavor profile to the mix. Yellow onions are inexpensive, easy to find, and have a predictable onion flavor. White onions are a bit sweeter and milder than yellow onions. Red onions are a little spicier than yellow onions, and carry their bright color through to the salad. Sweet onions are pricier, and as the name suggests, their flavor is milder and naturally sweeter.
Ingredients
1 cup water
½ cup distilled white vinegar
¼ cup vegetable oil
¼ cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste
3 cucumbers, peeled and sliced 1/4-inch thick
3 tomatoes, cut into wedges
1 onion, sliced and separated into rings
Directions
Gather all ingredients.
All ingredients gathered to make marinated cucumbers, onions and tomato salad.
Whisk water, vinegar, oil, sugar, salt, and pepper together in a large bowl until smooth.
Dressing ingredients whisked together in a bowl.
Add cucumbers, tomatoes, and onion and stir to coat.
Cucumbers, onions and tomatoes added to dressing, stirring to coat.
Cover bowl with plastic wrap; refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
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