Struggling to decide what to eat for lunch? If fresh, light and spicy are the qualities that make you drool, you should definitely try this deliciousness!
Our all time favorite thai food along with green curry! This salad is all about fresh veggies and flavourefull sauce. It really tickles all the taste reseptors with it's sweetness, sourness and saltyness, followed by a little finishing kick of red chili.
You can easily modify this dish so it fits in your taste and needs; just adjust the amount of spices, change veggies or add some protein (e.g. prawns go well and are often used in this dish). We think this is absolutely perfect dish for lunch or evening/midnight snack, since it's so light but takes away the hunger without making you feel swelled. In our opinion it is impossible to get sick of this, and last time we were in Thailand, we ate this every singe day for lunch or splitted a platefull of it as a side dish with some warm main course.
Obviously we had to buy ourselves a Som tam mortar and learn how to make it, to be able to prepare this at home anytime. Ever since we came back, we've made it almost every other week, following carefully the recipe our Thai-friend tought us.
Now we are going to share our recipe with you, so that you all are able to try this goodness and fell in love with it!
Our take on papaya salad
Ingredients (for two):
Salad base:
- 1/2 green papaya
- 1 carrot
- handful of mange tout peas
- 10cm piece of cucumber
- handful of sweet cherry tomatoes
- handful of roasted and salted peanuts
You can modify this to your taste by using different vegetables, for example long beans, green beans, cabbage or green eggplant. You can also serve this with seafood mixed in, e.g. scampi, prawns or calamari, if you want to make it more filling.
Sauce:
- 1 lime
- 2 tbsp of fish sauce
- 1 tbsp of palm sugar (or brow sugar if you can't find palm sugar)
- 1/2 - 1 garlic clove
- 1 Rawit (bird's eye) red chili
Feel free to adjust the flavors by adding more sugar for sweetness, or chili if you like it spicy (we use quite a small amount of chili, 'cause we are not used to spicy food in Finland). Thai people always add some dried shrimps to the sauce for extra fishy flavor, but we don't, because they are hard to find in Finland and are too lazy to dry fresh-ones in the oven ourselves.
How to prepare it?
At first we recommend you to make the sauce, so all the flavors will mix together well meanwhile you are cutting the veggies. So firstly put all the sauce ingredients into the mortar (sugar, fish sauce, chili, garlic and lime juice) and smash them together. You can tear some papaya and carrot along there as well as couple of tomatoes for more juiciness. It's okay to add the lime (chopped into 4-6 pieces) there too and some peanuts which will give nutty taste to sauce when they are crashed. It's important that you use your power to ram the mixture properly to break away all the juices.
Sauce waiting to be smashed.
The next step is to prepare all the veggies. You can blanch your peas if you want to. Then peel and tear papaya, carrot and cucumber or any other vegetable you have chosen to use. Old-school thai style is to chop the papaya with knife (as we did) but it's okay to use peeler or julienne peeler, since there is lot to cut! Halve the tomatoes.
When you are ready with the veggies, add the whole bunch of them into the mortar and mix them thoroughly with the sauce. You can use a table spoon with the mortar stick to make mixing easier. You don't have to smash the mixture anymore.
After this the salad is ready to be served! So plate it and remember to pour all that delicious sauce on top of the salad too. It's too damn good to waste. If you want to make sure you have lot of crunchiness in your dish, you can add some more peanuts on top of it all.
ENJOY!
P.S. If someone knows even better recipe, feel free to share it!
P.P.S. Let us know if you liked it or not, if you choose to try it. :)