Thai Beef Salad

Thai food is known for being spicy and this Thai beef salad is one of the best things to come out of our travels. Served with sliced rare beef steak and jasmine rice, it’s deliciously fragrant and fresh.

The four main ingredients in the marinade are fish sauce, sugar, lime and chillies – which make up the four key Thai flavours of salty, sweet, sour and spicy. We like our Thai food so hot it hurts, but if you can’t take the heat just reduce the amount of chillies (although this dish is meant to be super spicy!).

Apart from chillies the key ingredient here is fish sauce. This is used not only in Thai cooking but all over Asia and brings the salty flavour to many dishes. Most UK supermarkets now sell it, we recommend the Squid brand which you can find big bottles of in the “foreign foods” section for about the same price as the smaller ones.

thai fish sauce — Squid brand fish sauce

Ingredients: (Serves 2-3)

2 beef steaks
1/2 cucumber
2 tomatoes
1 red onion

Marinade:
10-12 birdseye chillies
2 cloves garlic
2 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp palm or brown sugar
Juice of 1 lime

Method:

1. Slice the tomatoes and red onion and place in a bowl. Peel the cucumber, cut in half and remove the seeds and juice from the middle. Slice the remainder and add to the tomatoes and onion.

2. Chop the garlic and chillies and grind for a few seconds with a pestle and mortar. Add the fish sauce, sugar and lime juice and mix thoroughly. You might want to adjust to your own taste (add more fish sauce for salt, more lime for sour etc.).