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Made this for a potluck and everyone asked for the recipe! The tangy dressing is amazing and the texture combination is so satisfying!
★★★★★
– Reylene
Cold, slippery, sharp with rice vinegar and toasted sesame oil.
That is what a bowl of harusame salad is supposed to do on a hot day, and the dressing is the part that does it.
Harusame salad
Recipe Snapshot
- What is it? A cold Japanese side of glass noodles and finely shredded vegetables in a sharp soy dressing, eaten most in the heat of summer.
- Flavor profile: Sour first, from plain rice vinegar. Savory underneath, from soy sauce and chicken bouillon powder. Japanese mustard lifts the whole thing into the nose, and toasted sesame oil goes over the top at the very last moment.
- Why you will love this recipe: It is cold, sour, and slippery on a day when nothing else sounds good, and it holds that edge in the bowl instead of loosening into water halfway through the meal.
- Must-haves: Glass noodles, plain unseasoned rice vinegar rather than the sushi kind. Asian-style chicken bouillon powder for the savory floor the dressing stands on.
- Skill level: Beginner-friendly.
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What Is Harusame Salad?
Harusame salad (春雨サラダ) is a cold side dish of clear starch noodles and matchstick vegetables, dressed sweet, sour, and savory.
The noodle is where the 2 countries meet. It came from China with temple cooking, then sat unmade in Japan for centuries. In 1937 a maker in Nara finally pushed starch through a plate of fine holes and watched the strands fall, and what they looked like was spring rain. Harusame is the Japanese word for spring rain, and that is what he called them. So the name is a picture of the noodle, not a season on the calendar, and you eat this in July.
For this recipe, I am building the dressing on rice vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, and chicken bouillon powder, then cutting it with Japanese karashi mustard.
Harusame Salad Ingredients
- Glass noodles: The bag on your shelf says bean thread, cellophane, or glass noodles on the front. Ming tang kind is what I built this around, but any glass noodles are fine to use (just adjust the cooking time and method). You can just buy the one that is in front of you.
- Chicken bouillon powder: This is the difference between a dressing that tastes like vinegar and soy sauce, and a dressing that tastes like a dish. It is the savory floor the sour stands on.
- Unseasoned rice vinegar: The sour edge is what makes this a harusame salad rather than cold noodles in a bowl, so reach for the plain, unseasoned bottle. Sushi vinegar arrives with sugar and salt already in it, and this dressing brings its own sugar, so you would be sweetening it twice.
Substitution Ideas
- Mung bean glass noodles → Potato and sweet potato starch harusame: Same family, different starch, and it is the swap that changes the most. The strands go softer and the dressing ends up inside them rather than on them, so the bowl eats fuller and rounder and the sharp edge steps back. Korean dangmyeon, the thick sweet potato noodle sold for the stir-fried noodle dish japchae, also works, though it is chewier and it stiffens harder once it goes cold.
- Imitation crab → Ham, shredded chicken, or canned tuna: All 3 slot in easily. Imitation crab and ham arrive already salted and seasoned, so the dressing stands as it is. Tuna comes in with less savory pull than the other 2, so taste it, and lean on the bouillon powder if it lands flat.
- Wood ear mushroom → Wakame, bean sprouts, or nothing at all: Wood ear is the dark, ruffled mushroom sold dried in bags at Asian grocers, and it is in this bowl for texture rather than flavor. Blanched bean sprouts give you a louder crunch. Rehydrated wakame goes the other way, soft and slippery instead of snappy, so the bowl leans slick rather than crisp. Leaving it out costs you texture, not identity.
- Kinshi tamago → Nothing: Kinshi tamago is a thin omelet cut into fine yellow threads, and the salad holds together without it. Plenty of bowls in Japan never see an egg at all. What you give up is the color and a little richness pushing back against all that vinegar, which is more than it sounds like.
- Japanese mustard → English mustard: English mustard lands in the same place, high in the nose and gone fast, so the dressing keeps its lift. Colman’s is the one I reach for, and I would not send you out hunting for anything more specific than that.
Have trouble finding Japanese ingredients? Check out my ultimate guide to Japanese ingredient substitutes!
How to Make My Harusame Salad
Before you start (Mise en place):
- Cucumber, carrot, and ginger: Julienne into fine matchsticks. Aim to match the width of the noodle. Everything is supposed to tangle and lift together on the chopsticks, and pieces cut wider than the strands fall out of the tangle on the way up.
- Wood ear mushroom: If it is fresh, give it 1 to 2 minutes in boiling water. If it is dried, soak it in hot water until it swells to several times its size and feels soft and springy rather than rubbery in the middle, which takes around 20 minutes, then give it the same 1 to 2 minutes in boiling water. Check the package on how to prepare them. Either way, drain it, let it cool, and press it between paper towels before you slice it thin.
- Imitation crab: gently pull it apart into shreds with your fingers.
i. Put the cucumber, carrot, and ginger matchsticks into a bowl, add the salt, and work it through with your hands until every shred is coated.
ii. Cover and rest in the fridge for 15 minutes. Go make the dressing while you wait.
A cucumber is water held inside cells, and those cell walls let water pass through but not much else. Put salt on the outside and the outside is suddenly saltier than the inside, and water travels toward the salt. So it leaves. Most of the water a cucumber is going to give up comes out over those 15 minutes and collects in a pool at the bottom of the bowl. That pool is water that would otherwise have turned up underneath your finished salad. You want to see it there. The squeeze at the end is how you throw it away.
i. In a small bowl, stir together the soy sauce, rice vinegar, sugar, karashi mustard, chicken bouillon powder, and the sesame seeds you set aside for the dressing.
ii. Keep stirring until the sugar and the bouillon powder have vanished into the liquid.
i. The vegetables are sitting in their salt anyway, so you have the time. Crack the egg into a bowl with the salt and the sugar. Stir it with chopsticks in a cutting motion, side to side across the bowl, rather than beating it. You are not trying to get air in. You are trying to keep it out.
ii. Pour the egg through a fine-mesh sieve into a second bowl. Now stir the potato starch and the water together into a slurry, and stir that into the strained egg, gently. Strain first, slurry second. That order is not decoration.
iii. Wipe the pan with oil, then wipe most of it straight back off with a paper towel. What you want is a film you can barely see. Set the heat low.
iv. Pour the egg in and tilt the pan around until it runs out thin and even. Then leave it alone. Do not poke it, do not push it, do not lift an edge to look.
v. When the surface has stopped looking wet, put a lid on for 20 seconds, then kill the heat and leave it covered while the pan finishes the top on its own. It never gets flipped.
vi. Slide a chopstick under an edge of the sheet, take hold of that edge with your fingers, and peel it off the pan in 1 direction. Do not scoop it with a spatula. Lay it out flat on a paper towel, not folded and not stacked, and let it go completely cold.
vii. Roll or loosely stack the cold sheet, then slice it thin, drawing the knife through rather than pressing down. Match the width of the noodle. Fluff the threads apart with your fingers.
i. Cook the noodles according to the package instructions. This could be a boil, it could be a soak. Either way, they should be soft before they go into your salad, so test and increase the timing where necessary. A slightly hard noodle can ruin your salad, and there’s no going back once they’re mixed in.
ii. Drain into a colander and rinse under cold running water, running your fingers through the strands as you go.
iii. Fill a bowl with cold water, drop a handful of ice into it, and slide the noodles in for a minute so they go properly cold. Then drain them again.
i. Lift the noodles out, press them between paper towels, and keep pressing until the towel stops going dark. If the strands are long, cut them to around 10 cm so they are manageable with chopsticks.
ii. Drain the salted vegetables, gather them into your fist, and squeeze. Then squeeze again, harder, until almost nothing comes out.
Further than it sounds. Squeeze until you are sure you have overdone it, and then go once more.
i. Put the dressing into the bottom of a large bowl first. You are not pouring it over anything. Everything is coming down to meet it.
ii. Add the salted vegetables and the wood ear, and toss until every shred is coated. They go in ahead of the noodles on purpose. The noodles drink, and if they land first they take the vegetables’ share of the dressing before the vegetables ever taste it.
iii. Add the noodles and toss well, lifting from underneath so the dressing gets up into the tangle rather than sitting below it.
iv. Add the kinshi tamago and the imitation crab last, folding them in gently so they do not tear. Going in last also means the egg spends the least time sitting in a soy-colored dressing, so the yellow stays yellow.
v. Plate it, scatter the sesame seeds you held back, and add a few more drops of sesame oil right before it goes to the table, so the aroma arrives before the bowl does.
If you follow the default recipe, it will yield 4-5 side servings.
Essential Tips & Tricks
- The water you cannot see is the water that gets you. A drained noodle looks dry and is not. A squeezed cucumber shred almost always has more to give. Neither of them tells you anything at the time, and both of them tell you 20 minutes later, when the dressing you tasted and approved is sitting in a pale puddle underneath the salad and the salad above it has gone quiet.
- The texture of the noodles is important. Some glass noodles say to boil, others say to soak. Whichever packet you have in front of you, follow the instructions and then test the doneness before you add them to the salad. We aim for a little softer than usual here, because hard noodles can’t be fixed once they’re mixed in.
- When you have pressed the noodles and they are still damp, give them a paper towel and 10 minutes. Ball up a sheet of it, bury that in the middle of the pile, put the whole thing back in the fridge, and go do something else. 10 minutes is nowhere near long enough for the cold to start hardening the strands, since that is a job the fridge does over hours and days.
Take the water seriously and this bowl becomes foolproof.
Storage & Meal Prep
Fridge: Airtight container, 2 to 3 days.
Freezer: Not recommended.
Meal prep: Keep it in pieces. Store the squeezed vegetables, the drained noodles, and the dressing in 3 separate containers, and toss them together in the minute before you eat.
What to Serve With This Recipe
Harusame Salad Troubleshooting
Water that should have left the vegetables before the dressing went on left them afterward instead. The salt pulls the free water out of a cucumber over those 15 minutes and gathers it in the bottom of the bowl, and the squeeze is the move that throws that water away. Squeeze gently and most of it is still in the shreds, so it comes out at the table rather than into the sink. Tip the bowl and pour the liquid off, lift the salad out onto paper towels for a moment, then put it back and toss. It will not be the bowl you would have had, but it will be a good one.
The starch that came off the strands in the pot was still on them when they cooled, and cooling starch turns tacky. That is the glue, and it is a rinsing failure rather than a boiling one. Drop the clump back into hot water for 30 seconds to loosen it, then rinse hard under cold running water while running your fingers through the strands, and drain. Cut them to a shorter length before they go anywhere near the bowl and they will not knit themselves back together.
Either they came out of the pot too early or weren’t soaked long enough. A salad noodle has to cook all the way through to the center, further than one headed for soup, because no heat touches it again once it leaves the pot. Put them back into boiling water for another minute, then rinse cold and drain the way you did the first time. Eat a few strands to test the texture rather than relying strictly on the package instructions.
More Japanese Salad Recipes
- Kani Salad with Crab Sticks
- Quick Japanese Cucumber Salad
- Wakame Seaweed Salad
- Creamy Japanese Potato Salad
Want another cold bowl for the same table? My Japanese salad recipe collection has the full lineup.
Did You Try This Recipe?
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Harusame Salad (Japanese-Style Glass Noodle Salad)
Ingredients
Vegetables
- 50 g Japanese cucumber or Persian cucumber
- 50 g carrot
- 5 g ginger root peeled
- ¼ tsp salt for the vegetables
Noodles and add-ins
- 50 g thin glass noodles (harusame)
- 1 boiled wood ear mushroom or 5 g dried
- 50 g imitation crab or ham
Kinshi tamago (optional)
- 1 egg
- 1 pinch salt
- ½ tsp sugar
- ½ tsp potato starch (katakuriko) or cornstarch
- 1 tsp water
- 1 tsp cooking oil a neutral oil such as canola or rice
Sauce
- 1 tbsp Japanese soy sauce (koikuchi shoyu)
- 1 tbsp unseasoned rice vinegar (komezu) not seasoned sushi vinegar
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 1 tsp Japanese mustard (karashi) in a tube, or English mustard such as Colman's
- ½ tsp Chinese-style chicken bouillon powder
- 1 tsp toasted white sesame seeds ½ tsp for the dressing, ½ tsp reserved for the top
- ½ tbsp toasted sesame oil
- 1 pinch ground white pepper
The ingredient brands and tools I trust are in my Japanese pantry guide and my cooking tools guide.
Can’t find certain Japanese ingredients? See my substitution guide here.
Instructions
- Cut 50 g Japanese cucumber, 50 g carrot, and 5 g ginger root into fine matchsticks a similar thickness to the noodles. Toss them in a bowl with ¼ tsp salt until every shred is coated, then cover and rest in the fridge for 15 minutes.
- In a small bowl, stir 1 tbsp Japanese soy sauce (koikuchi shoyu), 1 tbsp unseasoned rice vinegar (komezu), 1 tbsp sugar, 1 tsp Japanese mustard (karashi), ½ tsp Chinese-style chicken bouillon powder, and half of the toasted white sesame seeds until the sugar and bouillon powder dissolve completely.
- For the kinshi tamago (optional), crack 1 egg into a bowl with 1 pinch salt and ½ tsp sugar, and stir with chopsticks in a side-to-side cutting motion. Strain the egg through a fine sieve into a clean bowl. In a small separate bowl, mix ½ tsp potato starch (katakuriko) and 1 tsp water into a slurry, then stir that into the strained egg.
- Wipe a pan with 1 tsp cooking oil, then wipe most of it back off. Set the heat low, pour in the egg, and tilt the pan until it runs thin and even. When the top is no longer wet, cover for 20 seconds, then turn off the heat and leave the lid on. Do not flip it.
- Slide a chopstick under an edge, lift the sheet, and peel it off in one direction. Lay it flat on a paper towel, not folded or stacked, and let it cool completely. Roll or loosely stack the cold sheet, slice it thin, and fluff the threads apart with your fingers.
- Blanch wood ear mushroom in boiling water for 1 to 2 minutes (for 5 g dried, soak it in warm water for 20 minutes first, then blanch). Drain, cool, and press it dry between paper towels before slicing it thin. Pull 50 g imitation crab into shreds with your fingers.
- Cook 50 g thin glass noodles (harusame) according to the time on the package. Taste test to make sure they're soft, then drain and rinse under cold running water. Slide them into a bowl of iced water for 1 minute and drain again. Press them dry between paper towels and cut to about 10 cm if long.
- Drain the salted vegetables, gather them in your fist, and squeeze. Squeeze again, harder, until almost nothing comes out.
- Spoon the dressing into the bottom of a large bowl. Tip in the salted vegetables and the wood ear and turn them through until coated. Add the noodles and toss well, lifting from underneath. Gently fold in the kinshi tamago and the crab last.
- Drizzle the ½ tbsp toasted sesame oil over the top, add 1 pinch ground white pepper, and toss lightly. Serve lightly chilled. Scatter the reserved the other half of toasted white sesame seeds over the top and add a few more drops of sesame oil just before serving. Enjoy!
Made this for a potluck and everyone asked for the recipe! The tangy dressing is amazing and the texture combination is so satisfying!
Hi Raylene,
Wow, that’s awesome! So glad everyone loved it!
Yuto
Made this tonight, It was great! Thank yo for the recipe! 🙂
Hi May,
Thank you for trying this recipe! I’m happy to hear that you enjoyed it! 🙂
Yuto