Last weekend I cooked Thai food for friends. We had tom yam, green chicken curry, pad thai, beef salad, ca chien muoi xa (fish with lemongrass, from Alan Davidson’s Seafood of South East Asia [1]), and fragrant rice. The clear favourite was beef salad, for which I used a recipe from Jennifer Brennan’s excellent The Original Thai cookbook [2].
I adapted Jennifer’s recipe roughly as follows:
First, grill or barbeque a piece of beef. Fillet is best but sirloin (or New York strip) is fine: season it well with black pepper. I prefer to grill it on a very hot barbeque for a few minutes only each side (depending on size), pouring over some melted butter, creating a ‘flare up’ to give the beef a slightly blackened crust. However you do it, it should be very rare inside. Then allow to cool, wrap in tinfoil and refrigerate. This can be done well in advance.
Then prepare a platter with some salad leaves. Tear up some basil, mint and coriander leaves and sprinkle over the lettuce. Finely grate over this a stalk of lemongrass, and scatter over some thinly sliced red birdseye chilli. Now slice the beef thinly and lay over the salad bed: it will be easier to slice cold. I prefer to allow it then to come up to ambient temperature before dressing and serving, but others might prefer the whole thing chilled.
Make a dressing by pounding some green chilli and garlic in a mortar. Add fish sauce and lime juice in equal quantities and a teaspoon or so of sugar. Stir to mix well. Finely slice some red onion over the beef and then the dressing. Garnish with some fried onion and dried red chilli flakes, or whatever you fancy.
Obviously the quantities are determined by how many you plan to feed, and how hot you like it. Just use your imagination, experiment, or scale the proportions in Jennifer’s book. If you don’t have the book: buy it. Its not just a recipe book, but a comprehensive introduction to the origins and development of Thai cuisine.
