Recipe: Larb, Laab, Laap: Thai minced meat salad
The new cookbook Thai by Tove Nilsson is packed with authentic Thai dishes. From perfectly prepared sticky rice and satay gai from the grill to caramelized palm sugar ice cream with tamarind sauce: Thai teaches you to cook with the flavors of salt, salt, spice and sour that characterize Asian cuisine. Our favorite? Larb! A salad of minced pork with a salty-sour dressing, aromatic herbs and toasted rice powder. A meat salad may not sound very festive, but read on, because here comes the most delicious dish in the world.
Larb salad comes from northern Thailand, mainly from the province of Isaan, and exists in many variations. The classic version is made with lightly fried minced meat and lots of fresh herbs. There is the blood version, in which pork or chicken is minced for a long time while the mince is simultaneously ‘fed’ with blood, then fried with spices reminiscent of Chinese five-spice powder. The most remarkable version is the one with bile juice, which naturally sounds terrible if you are unfamiliar with it, but it gives the dish a bitter note and a little more complexity.
Thai for chopping
Laap is Thai for ‘chopping’, and the salad is based on minced meat, usually chopped by hand with a very large knife. A simple variation is to use ready-made minced pork, beef, lamb or chicken, but it is absolutely worth chopping it yourself if you have the time. For a meat-free version, Tove varies it with finely chopped fish, crumbled tofu or eggs fried into fairly dry pieces of scrambled egg.
To counterbalance this very meaty salad, it is almost always served with sticky rice and phak kap laap, a platter of vegetables, herbs, beans, sometimes Thai eggplant or something else green. The salad is often mixed with toasted rice powder. This gives the dish a delicious flavor, a little like the crispy crust of bread. You make the powder by toasting and grinding uncooked sticky rice. I tried it with jasmine rice for lack of sticky rice, and that works too. The powder contains slightly less starch, which binds the salad dressing, but the flavor is very good. You can also buy it ready-made at an Asian grocery store.
How to make larb
- Heat a frying pan over medium heat. Add the minced meat and water to the pan. Break up and fry the meat until cooked through, but not yet browned.
- Remove the pan from the heat and mix the minced meat with the oil, fish sauce, sugar, chili powder, dried chili, lime juice and rice powder. Stir well so that the sauce mixes and is thickened by the rice powder.
- Mix in the lime leaves, shallot and herbs. Season with salt and sourness.
- I think sticky rice is a must to serve alongside it, but jasmine rice works too, of course. Or stir glass noodles or rice noodles through the minced meat. A green papaya salad is also delicious with it.
Title: Thai
Author: Tove Nilsson
Price: €20.95
Publisher: Good Cook
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