Easy Japanese Quick Pickled Cucumber (Sunomono)

Sunomono is Japanese quick pickled cucumber salad. It comes together in just 30 minutes and is perfect as an easy vegetable side dish. Serve this with broiled salmon and rice or with any Japanese noodle. This quick pickle recipe is so easy, you can memorize it and never come back to this page (I’ll miss you). Better yet, you can also use it on any vegetable! Make pickled radishes, banh mi veggies, pickled onions for tacos. The world is your oyster… er… cucumber?

What is Sunomono?

Sunomono is Japanese quick pickled cucumber. It typically is sliced crosswise into coins, unlike American pickles which are eaten in spears, and is served cold as a side dish. You can often find sunomono in bento boxes, as pickled foods are an important component for Japanese set meals. I like to eat sunomono as a side dish with salmon and rice or as a side to soba or somen. It’s a great vegetable side for hot days, since you don’t need to heat anything up.

Typically, sunomono is sliced paper thin and taken out of its pickling liquid for serving. However, I want to note that all my pictures show not-so-thin sunomono in the bowl with the pickling brine still in it. Why? Because I’m a busy mom, and I don’t feel like spending more time slicing cucumbers than I really need to. I plop the whole thing down in the middle of our table for people to serve themselves. When the meal is over, I stick the whole bowl back in the fridge. You can do that too. No one is judging you.

Sunomono vs. Tsukemono

You might have heard of Japanese pickled veggies referred to as tsukemono. So what’s the difference between sunomono and tsukemono? Tsukemono generally refers to any Japanese pickled dish. For example, there’s takuan, the yellow pickled daikon. There’s also gari, the thinly sliced pink pickled ginger that gets served with sushi. Just One Cookbook has a great guide to tsukemono on her blog.

Sunomono refers to specifically quick pickled cucumbers. Therefore, sunomono is a type of tsukemono. Get it?

Making Asian Quick Pickled Vegetables

The thing I love most about this recipe is that you can MEMORIZE the pickling brine. Really! Take one part sugar, then two parts vinegar, then four parts water. That’s your brine! Just start with the sugar and double your ingredient at each step.

Most traditional sunomono recipes I’ve seen don’t use water, but mine does. Why? Well, mainly because I just like it better. I find that without the water, the pickles get a little too acidic for my tastes. It also helps with making big batches. I don’t have to dump huge amounts of sugar and vinegar to scale up my recipe because the water makes it easy to submerge everything in the liquid.

I found that this more diluted pickling brine is also more versatile in making all sorts of Asian quick pickled veggies! Here are some ideas for additional vegetables to try:

• shredded daikon
• shredded carrot (these two make great banh mi vegetables)
• sliced radishes
• onions

What Kind of Vinegar to Use for Quick Pickling?

The last note I have about quick pickling vegetables in Asian cuisine is about the vinegar. My recipe lists rice vinegar, but you could definitely substitute any white vinegar. It’s really up to your preference. When I make Japanese food, I tend to use rice vinegar. When I make banh mi veggies, I opt for distilled white vinegar.

Any more pickly questions for me? Let me know in the comments below!