Thai beef salad: four flavours in one dressing
Yum nua is a good introduction to Thai cooking, because it shows plainly a principle behind many Thai dishes: a balance of tastes — sour from lime, salty from fish sauce, sweet from sugar and hot from chilli. The dressing is mixed and tasted until none of them dominates. The meat is almost an accessory; the salad is made by the sauce and the herbs, of which there are as many here as there is lettuce in a European salad.
Your own work in that: 45 min.
- Beef 25 min
- Dressing 8 min
- Assembly 12 min
Step by step
0 / 6 doneDry and season the beef
Pat the beef dry with kitchen paper and season with salt and pepper. If you have time, take it out of the fridge 20–30 minutes ahead — with a thick piece it makes an evenly pink centre easier.
Ingredients: 500 g sirloin or fillet steak · 2 tbsp oil · 1 tsp salt · ½ tsp freshly ground pepper
Sear it hard
Heat a pan very hot and cook the beef in oil 3–4 minutes a side (about 8 minutes in all), pressing it down to make contact and searing the edges at the end. You want a dark, even crust with the middle still pink. A thermometer is the surest guide: take the beef off at 52–54 °C in the centre.
TipBeef cooked medium rare (about 55–57 °C at the centre after resting) works best in this salad: it is tender and, sliced thin, does not fall apart into fibres.
A dark crust, a pink centreRest it ten minutes
Move the beef to a board and leave 10 minutes, loosely covered with foil. Cut straight away, it loses more juice and ends up drier. After resting, slice it across the grain, 3 mm thick.
Ten minutes, then thin across the grainBalance the dressing
Mix the lime juice, fish sauce, sugar, chopped chilli and crushed garlic. Taste and adjust: it should be sour, salty, faintly sweet and hot all at once, with nothing in the foreground. Too sour — sugar; too salty — lime.
Ingredients: 3 pcs limes, juice · 3 tbsp fish sauce · 2 tsp brown sugar · 2 pcs red chillies · 2 cloves garlic
TipA dressing like this is the base of many Thai salads and works equally with prawns, chicken or vegetables alone. Worth memorising the ratio: <b>3 limes : 3 tablespoons fish sauce : 2 teaspoons sugar</b>.
Sour, salty, sweet, hot — in balanceToss the vegetables and herbs
Slice the cucumber into half-moons, halve the tomatoes, slice the onion thinly and the spring onions into rings. Toss with a whole bunch of coriander and every mint leaf — the herbs are a vegetable here, not a garnish, and should be present in every mouthful.
Ingredients: 1 pcs cucumber · 250 g cherry tomatoes · 1 pcs red onion · 3 pcs spring onions · 25 pcs fresh mint · 1 bunch fresh coriander · 6 pcs lettuce
A whole bunch of coriander, all the mintAssemble at the last moment
Toss the vegetables with two thirds of the dressing and lay them on a platter over lettuce leaves. Arrange the beef slices on top and spoon over the rest. Serve at once — the salt and acid draw water from the vegetables and within a quarter of an hour the salad goes limp.
Beef on top, the last of the dressing over it
Before you start
With toasted rice
An addition borrowed from its cousin, nam tok: two tablespoons of rice toasted in a dry pan and ground to a coarse powder. It brings a nutty flavour and a slight crunch, and takes five minutes.
Without fish sauce
Substitute soy sauce with an extra pinch of salt. The flavour is less complex, since fish sauce carries an umami soy does not have in the same form — but the salad still works.
With other proteins
Prawns (2 minutes in the pan), grilled chicken or fried tofu. Same technique: sear hard, cool, slice and lay on top — never mixed into the dressing beforehand.
Heat level
Two chillies give a clearly hot but edible salad. In Thailand there may be many more. For milder, remove the seeds and the white membranes, where most of the capsaicin lives.
