Kani Salad is a delicious Japanese seafood salad brimming with contrasting textures, tastes, and colours. Kani simply means ‘crab’ in Japanese. In this context, it refers to imitation crab meat. They look like real crab legs, but instead are made from white fish, such as pollock, that has been processed and mixed with starch to mimic the shape, texture, and flavour of crab legs.

Recipe:

• Salting the vegetables to coax out their water is a technique called shiomomi (literally "rubbed with salt" in Japanese). It removes excess water from the vegetables, keeping the salad from getting soggy. It also gives the vegetables a nice crunch, similar to pickles.
• Glass noodles add another layer of texture to the salad while bulking it up.
• Combining Japanese mayonnaise and lemon zest/juice creates a creamy yet refreshing mayonnaise-based dressing.

How to Make Kani Salad

• You first want to toss the sliced cucumber and julienned carrots with the salt to help draw out their excess water. This keeps the salad from getting soggy when you combine it with the dressing while giving the veggies a nice crunchy texture. Let these sweat while you prepare the other ingredients. Once the vegetables have become limp, you can speed things up by massaging them with your hand until the cucumbers have turned translucent. Gather the veggies with both hands and squeeze as much water out of them as possible.
• Then, you want to rehydrate and cook the glass noodles by soaking them in a medium bowl of boiling water. How long it takes depends on how thick your noodles are, but mine took about 7 minutes until they were tender. Once they're cooked, you can drain and rinse them with cold water. Be sure to squeeze out any excess water with your hands before adding them to the Kani Salad.
• For the imitation crab sticks, you want to shred them into thin strips by hand. This takes a bit of time, but the fastest way I've found to do this is to roll the sticks between your hands, applying moderate pressure. This causes the sticks to fall apart, and you can shred them the rest of the way with your fingers.
• Add the shredded crab sticks, squeezed vegetables, cooked glass noodles, black sesame seeds, scallions, and mayonnaise to a bowl. Using a micro-plane, zest half a lemon over the salad, then cut the lemon in half and squeeze some of the juice over the salad. How much lemon juice you add is a matter of personal preference, but I usually add about two teaspoons.
• Toss the dressing ingredients together with the Kani and veggies to distribute evenly. I like to serve my Kani salad on a bed of lettuce leaves garnished with extra chopped scallions.