By Leslie Brenner
When I’m craving something tangy and fresh, there’s nothing that satisfies like som tam — Thai green papaya salad.
This version, adapted from Leela Punyaratabandu’s wonderful Simple Thai Food, not only satisfies that craving spectacularly; it’s also a great introduction to Thai cooking. It may even make you feel like a star. Keep your eyes open for green papayas — this is a dish will tang up your entire summer.
Backgrounder: Bangkok-born Leela Punyaratabandhu, who now divides her time between Bangkok and Chicago, has written for Serious Eats, Dill Magazine, Food52 and the Wall Street Journal, among others. She launched her Thai cooking blog, She Simmers, in 2008; four years later, it was honored as “Best Regional Cuisine” blog by Saveur. It has been inactive for a few years, though still very much worth reading — especially if you wind up buying Simple Thai Food, her 2014 cookbook, and loving it as much as we do. She has since written two other books, Bangkok and Flavors of the Southeast Asian Grill. We look forward to exploring those. But first things first: Simple Thai Food is life-changingly excellent.
Why we love it: Having spent much of my adult life in places with easy access to outstanding Thai restaurants, I’d never been moved to learn to cook Thai food. Then came the pandemic, and being shut in made me crave its bright, optimistic herbal tang, its lovely perfume of makrut lime leaves and lemongrass. Punyaratabandhu’s slim, 228-page volume makes Thai cooking approachable and accessible. Further, her recipes, though simple to execute (once you get your hands on the right ingredients), look and taste anything but simple; they’re extraordinarily sophisticated, downright impressive, with beautiful layered, balanced flavors.
Punyaratabandhu writes instructions that are not only clear and easy to follow, she also thoughtfully describes exactly the way a dish should look and taste as you cook, helping us appreciate the cuisine as it’s meant to be enjoyed.
Phat Phrik Khing — a dry curry, lightly sweet, of pork and long beans (or in this case, green beans). It is garnished with a chiffonnade of makrut lime leaves.
That is particularly valuable when many of us may be using mediocre Thai restaurant renditions of dishes as yardsticks. “This dish is not supposed to be saucy,” she writes in the instructions for Phat Phrik Khing — a dry curry, lightly sweet, of pork and long beans. “When it looks like a dry curry that glistens with deep orange oil, you know it is done.” In those Americanized Thai places that offer “choice of protein” with this dish, that deep orange oil rarely shows up on the plate.
If you’re like me, you’ll be astounded at how simple it is (again, once you have the key ingredients) to make Tom Yam Kung (hot-and-sour prawn soup) or Tom Kha Kai — Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup.
Tom Kha Kai — Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup
Som Tam — the green papaya salad that launched my pandemic Thai cravings — is easy to manage as well. Shredding the green papaya so that it does not bruise is best achieved using a mandoline (great excuse to buy one if you don’t already own one). The author also suggests a hand grater, calling out an inexpensive one called Kiwi Pro Slice.
Som Tam Malako — Green Papaya Salad
Read this first: Buried at the end of the book is Punyaratabandhu’s extremely essential Ingredients Glossary. It’s where I would suggest you start if you want to dive into Thai cooking. In it, the author explains everything you need to know about palm sugar (it’s complicated; if you’re not already familiar with it you might want to stick with her suggested sub of brown sugar. We also used coconut sugar as a sub, with excellent results). She also explains that Thai eggplants may be eaten raw; the differences between Thai basil, holy basi and lemon basil; what to look for when you buy galangal (plus how to freeze it) and how to use makrut lime leaves and rind (and how to freeze them). While we are on the subject, Angkor Cambodian Food is a great source for many of these ingredients. If you think about gathering all your ingredients first, and prep and freeze those that can be frozen, you will be much better off when you finally dive in.
In the glossary, Punyaratabandhu insists on the use of some of these hard-to-source ingredients for particular dishes, and no doubt she’s right in doing so. Happily, she does condone shortcuts when the resulting flavor is acceptable, allowing that commercial Thai curry pastes are far better than homemade ones made with inappropriately subbed ingredients.
You’ve gotta try this: Among the many amazing Thai dishes I made from this book, the one my family was most bowled over by was a sort of dip called Lon Kung Mu Sap, which Punyaratabandhu translates as Shrimp-Coconut Relish with Vegetable Crudités. Basically, it’s chopped shrimp and pork simmered together in coconut milk, brightened with tamarind paste and seasoned with shallot and chiles and garnished with makrut lime leaves.
Leela Punyaratabandu’s Shrimp-Coconut Relish with Crudités (Lon Kung Mu Sap)
“Most people who did not grow up in a Thai household or live with Thai people are unfamiliar with the various coconut milk-based relishes called lon,” she explains in the headnote. She also explains that it is served not before dinner (as a westerner might guess), but along with the rest of the meal. Punyaratabandhu went to to share how she likes to eat it: “I take a piece of the vegetable crudités, put it on a bite’s worth of rice on my plate, top it with a dollop of the lon, transport the whole assembly on a spoon, and eat it in one big bite.”
Thank you for that delicious morsel, dear author.
Dear reader, if you’ve ever been tempted to try your hand at Thai cooking — or if you’ve done quite a bit of it and want a great reference with great recipes — you need this book.
Bangkok Guac, flavored with lemongrass, shallots, Thai chiles, fish sauce and lime and garnished with makrut lime leaves and cilantro, is weirdly fabulous — especially scooped up with a shrimp chip.
A few years back, the New York Times enraged the internet by publishing recipe for guacamole that included fresh English peas.
I’ve done something much worse. I’ve compromised everyone’s favorite avocado dip by giving it a Thai aromatic treatment. And you know what? I’d do it again in a hot minute.
How would a sane person come up with such a crazy idea?
I was reading a Facebook post by Pati Jinich, in which the star of the PBS show Pati’s Mexican Table discussed the role of lime in guacamole.
Being from Mexico City, I was fully for having lime in my guacamole until I tried one with roasted Anaheim in Sonora...
Posted by Pati Jinich on Thursday, October 29, 2020
That led me, because I’ve been cooking a lot of Thai food (in which limes figure prominently), to start thinking about a few of the other flavors Thai food and Mexican food have in common. Chiles. Cilantro. And then I thought: What if you took Thai versions of those flavors, added them to other Thai flavors, and put them in a guacamole?
In Thai cooking, a large mortar and pestle is often used to grind together aromatics, just as the molcajete is used in Mexican cooking, so I’d start there.
Green Thai long chiles could stand in for serranos or jalapeños. Finely cut makrut lime leaves would add a gorgeous perfume, and makrut zest might add an enchanting underpinning. Shallots — which are important in Thai cooking, and often used raw — could replace white onion. Lime juice, cilantro and avocado would be the common thread, and hey — what about fish sauce instead of salt, to up the umami factor?
Instead of tortilla chips, we could scoop it up with shrimp chips — those light, airy, addictive, melt-on-the-tongue snacks that come in bags like potato chips.
Sliced lemongrass, minced shallot, chopped Thai green chiles, finely chopped makrut lime zest and cilantro leaves about to be ground in a molcajete — maybe for the first time anywhere!
Into the molcajete went sliced lemongrass, minced shallot, Thai green chiles, chopped makrut lime zest and cilantro leaves. I held my breath. Who had ever put such a combo in a molcajete before? Maybe no one ever?!
Grinding them to a paste, I was rewarding a gorgeous aroma — the high note of the lemongrass, the perfume of makrut lime. In went a trio of ripe avocados, a good dose of lime juice and a couple teaspoons of fish sauce.
Wowie kazowie! It was even better than I imagined — these ingredients indeed have an amazing affinity with the avocado, and the fish sauce underlined it all with a gentle soulful salty funk that added incredible dimension. The garnish: more minced shallot, cilantro leaves and — an essential flourish — julienned makrut lime leaves made it taste (and smell) even more deliciously Thai.
I love the Bangkok Guac with shrimp chips, and when you scoop up a bit of guac on one, you can hear the chip faintly sizzle and pop from the touch of the guac’s moisture. We tried them with cucumber chips, too — Persian cukes sliced diagonally into slices about 3/8 inch thick. The flavor combo with the cukes was beautiful, though the cuke chips are a bit slippery with the guac.
So, how good is this Bangkok Guac? Well, I’m not sure I’d turn myself upside down trying to find the ingredients just to make it. But if it’s not too much trouble to source them, I would absolutely highly recommend you give it a try. If you have a Thai grocery or an Asian supermarket with good supplies of Thai ingredients available, you should be able to find the makrut lime leaves and lemongrass, and sometimes you can even find lemongrass in well stocked Western supermarkets. Makrut limes for zesting is more of a challenge; they are available online (see the recipe for a great source). I think if you used regular Persian or key lime zest, you’d come close.
Meanwhile, we are working on a review of an awesome Thai cookbook, Simple Thai Food. If you wind up loving the book, and loving cooking Thai as much as we now do, you’ll want to stock up on these essential ingredients. Once you start stocking these ingredients, Bangkok Guac may sound like just the thing when you spot ripe avocados.
OK, enough talking. Here’s the recipe.
RECIPE: Bangkok Guac
Please let us know what you think — either of the recipe itself, or even of the idea.