Roasted Snap Pea Salad With Yakult-Style Dressing
Photo by Cheyenne Ellis.
- Serves
- 2-3
- Prep Time
- 30 Minutes
"Here’s a dish that Frost and I call our Inner Smile Salad. It’s everything you want for a cookout. It’s super easy, so you can make it ahead and bring it in a Tupperware. Or you can prop a cast-iron pan on the beach flames and make it right there and then. After a hot fire, lots of sun, and piles of grilled meat, it’s a hydrating, cooling, creamy, green gift that’s fun to eat, with a mix of savory elements tucked amid the sweetness that Frost loves. We hammer bowls of it. The dressing is my knockoff of a Japanese probiotic milk drink called Yakult. It’s fermented with a different strain of bacteria than yogurt, and that’s where it gets its citrusy tang. But we can zhush yogurt to achieve the same effect."—Scott Clark
Ingredients
Yakult-Style Dressing
- 1/2 cup [120 g] yogurt
- 1 tablespoon honey
- 2 teaspoon fresh lime juice
- 1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice, preferably Meyer
Roasted Snap Pea Salad
- 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
- 12 ounce [340 g] sugar snap peas, stems and fibrous ribs removed
- 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
- 3 Persian cucumbers
- 1/2 bunch fresh chives, cut crosswise into thirds
- 1 teaspoon toasted white sesame seeds
- 1 teaspoon black sesame seeds
Featured Video
Excerpted from Coastal: 130 Recipes from a California Road Trip by Scott Clark with Betsy Andrews, © 2025. Published by Chronicle Books. Photographs © Cheyenne Ellis.
Directions
Instructions
- Step 1
<strong>To make the Yakult-style dressing:</strong> In a small bowl, mix all the ingredients until fully combined. It keeps, in the fridge in an airtight container, for up to 1 week.
- Step 2
<strong>To make the roasted snap pea salad:</strong> In a 9 in [23 cm] cast iron pan over high heat, get the sesame oil ripping hot and smoking. Drop in the peas and cook them without moving them until one side gets good and charred, 3 to 5 minutes. When they’re hissing at you and barely wanting to stay inside the pan, give the peas a push. Some will turn over. Add the salt and continue cooking the peas for 3 to 4 minutes more. You want them unevenly charred. Put the peas on a sheet pan and stow them in the fridge or pop them in a cooler to get nice and cold, about 15 minutes.
- Step 3
Remove the tops and bottoms of your cukes. Holding your knife at a 45-degree angle, cut a chunk of cuke. Roll the cuke 180 degrees and cut again to get weird, triangular pieces. Repeat with all the cukes, then smash all the pieces with the side of your blade. They’ll hold together because their shape gives them maximum skin. Add the cukes and chilled snap peas to a serving bowl.
- Step 4
Add enough dressing to the serving bowl to heavily coat the veg and mix well. Toss in the chives and all the sesame seeds and serve.