Soba Noodle Salad with Peppers, Cabbage & Carrots

Why You Need This Recipe

It is a quick & easy cold noodle salad with plenty of veggies. You can take advantage of packaged precut vegetables to reduce the amount of work you have to do, which is already pretty minimal to begin with for this simple recipe.

Depending on your preference, you can adjust the amount of noodles and vegetables. You can make tweaks to the balance of noodles and vegetables in the recipe. I know sometimes with a sesame noodle salad or a pasta salad, I like to throw in more veggies. These kinds of salads are also an easy way to use other vegetables and leftovers in your kitchen that you might not know what to do with.

You will fall in love with the tahini ginger dressing. This is a creamy vegan salad dressing. Tahini is the key ingredient to give it that silky consistency and sesame flavor. It’s also aromatic with minced garlic and fresh ginger. This dressing delivers on taste and brings all the ingredients together.

The Ingredients

This is what you need:

• Soba noodles are gluten-free as long as they contain buckwheat flour without any wheat flour blended in. Udon noodles, rice noodles or even whole-wheat spaghetti are good substitutes.
• Cabbage: With its purple leaves, red cabbage is crunchy especially when it’s sliced into shreds. You can buy it already shredded or cut the cabbage yourself.
• Carrots: I prefer buying shredded carrots because the cuts are cleaner, but you can use the grater disc on your food processor or the big holes of a box grater to do it yourself.
• Red bell pepper: I slice a red bell pepper lengthwise into thin strips. Again, it goes with the theme of the veggies in this dish: fresh and crunchy. You can substitute with a yellow or orange pepper.
• Scallions add mild green onion flavor, almost acting like an herb.
• Cilantro is my first choice when it comes to fresh herbs for this cold noodle salad. If you’re not a cilantro person, I recommend adding another scallion.
• Sesame seeds are a nutty finishing touch. It helps to lightly toast them in a dry skillet because it brings out more of their flavor.
• Tahini ginger dressing: It has fresh ginger, minced garlic, lime juice, soy sauce, salt and pepper. When you first taste it, you might think it’s a bit strong, but you need all that flavor to give the noodles personality. You can swap out the soy sauce and use tamari or coconut aminos to make it gluten-free. If you prefer peanut flavor, you can use peanut butter instead of tahini.

How To Make This Soba Noodle Salad

1. Make the dressing. Whisk the ginger, garlic, tahini, lime juice, soy sauce, salt, pepper and oil. They should be fully combined into a creamy dressing that’s thick, but still very pourable, so then it will easily coat the noodles and veggies.

2. Cook the noodles. Follow the recommended cook time on the package. Then use tongs to transfer the noodles to a big bowl of cold water to shock them. After that, drain the noodles. Putting them in ice cold water rinses off the excess starch, so they don’t become gummy.

3. Stir the dressing with the noodles. Do this in a bowl that is large enough to hold all the ingredients. I toss the noodles before adding the veggies, so they end up lightly dressed.

4. Add the cabbage, carrots, red peppers, scallions, cilantro and sesame seeds and toss everything together. I like using a fork and a spoon to do this to get the cabbage, carrots and peppers mixed into the soba noodles. Sometimes I will use my hands even though it’s a bit messy because it gets the job done.

Serving

These noodles are great for lunch or dinner as a main dish. If you have roasted or grilled chicken or tofu, you can also stir that into the noodles. You can serve these sautéed snap peas or steamed edamame on the side.

If you’re a salad person, don’t miss my easy seasonal salad guide for inspiration all year long.