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 โ 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.

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.).


3. Pour the marinade over the sliced salad and place in the fridge.

4. Cook the Jasmine rice and the beef steak. We use a George Foreman grill, usually 2-3 minutes for medium/rare steak.
5. Plate up, crack open an ice cold beer and get ready for a flavour sensation with a super chilli high!
What’s your favourite Thai dish? Do you have any other recipe tips for a tasty beef salad? Let us know in the comments below!
Comments (2)
This is great, guys! I miss Thai food a ton so I should start cooking it myself lol!
Thanks Kristin! We miss it too, this is a regular in our house ๐