Cold Sesame Noodles With Cucumber, Corn and Basil

Definitely needs soy sauce, though pretty good with the addition of fish sauce, rice vinegar, and honey.

Pretty bland. Needs a sweet and acidic component.

Agree with prior commenters—the sauce is extremely bland on its own, but very easy to improve: 1. Double the existing measurements (not enough sauce otherwise). 2. Add (lots of) soy sauce, honey, and lime to sauce mixture, to taste (sorry, didn’t measure, just kept adding each until it tasted right). 3. Add additional generous squeeze of lime on serving. With these additions, will definitely be part of our regular summer rotation!

It’s generally my policy never to make dishes that need as much as this one did per the comments. But the idea of the dish was really appealing to me and the tips were inspiring so I gave it a try. Epic fail. Everything about this was wrong. So bland and heavy even with the addition of soy sauce, lime, extra veggies, etc. Nothing I did made it any better. I appreciate all of the helpful tips. They just didn’t work out for me.

Love all the suggestions and comments on the NYT recipes! I added a splice of lime juice, 1 tsp Tamari, 1 tablespoons smooth peanut butter

Awful. A few shakes of soy sauce helped but I will look for a different recipe. Sorry, Hetty.

Agree on needing more salt. I added soy the first time and dashi the next.

used rice noodles - wheat next time. Needed salt and lime lime. WAY too spicy with 4 tsp chili crisp

Liked this ingredient combo, but definitely do not sub tahini for Chinese or Japanese sesame paste as the recipe says you can do. Even with toasted sesame oil it comes out too bland.

I'm a salt lover, and found that with salted water (and depending upon your chile crisp of choice), I disagree with many here about adding soy or more salt. I use Kari Kari Chili Crisp and it's amazing -- has crispy shaved garlic and peanuts mixed in. I do agree with acidity adds like lime or rice vinegar. A wedge of lime did the trick for us. This was so easy and quick, and will make again for sure. Added some sriracha tofu cutlet cubed and browned, sliced scallion, and chopped cilantro.

I concur that this recipe needs to be jazzed up. I added soy sauce, scallions, mirin, Also unless you have very fresh, very tender corn, put wet corn in the nuker for a couple of minutes, then cool

I added all the things recommended by others - ginger, garlic paste, soy sauce, fresh mint, extra basil, green onions, lime, grilled the corn - and made the sauce with tahini and natural peanut butter over udon noodles. It was good. My neighbor loved it. What made it great was the chili crisp topping - I got a malaysian one and it really elevated the entire dish, making me think the original recipe might have been good (with lime) enough with the chili topping.

Taking the advice of a previous comment, I added a little dark soy sauce (1 teaspoon), rice wine vinegar (1 teaspoon) and some fresh mint — and (1 teaspoon) lime juice. The fresh mint and basil definitely make the dish sing. Perfect for a warm summer night.

I thought this was great and plan to make it again throughout the Summer! I suppose some of the flavor depends on what brand of chili crisp you buy…I did add a little soy sauce. Great for your vegan friends.

This recipe seemed to be missing something? Not enough salt. I wonder if substituting soy sauce instead of using water would fix the problem.