Thai-Style Beef Salad

Name: Thai-Style Beef Salad
Cuisine: Australia
Ingredients: salt and freshly ground black pepper; 3 baby Gem lettuces or 1 large Cos or romaine lettuce; ½ teaspoon salt; 1 teaspoon soy sauce; 2 garlic cloves, peeled; 3 tablespoons white rice; 2 heaped tablespoons grated palm sugar (or use demerara or brown sugar); bunch of coriander, ideally with the roots on; 3 banana shallots, thinly sliced (or use 4–6 regular round shallots); 2 handfuls of roasted, skinless peanuts, roughly chopped (or use the caramelized peanuts); 2 teaspoons vegetable oil (groundnut oil works well here); finely grated zest of 2 limes and 150 ml lime juice (6–8 limes); 1 teaspoon Thai fish sauce; 1–2 hot red chillies, roughly chopped (more or less to taste, but you do want some fire in this dish); 600 g beef fillet, trimmed of all sinew and fat; handful of mint leaves, stems removed and large leaves torn in half

With Coriander, Mint, Lime and Peanuts

Preparation info

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

Salads

By Peter Gordon

Published 2005

About

I first ate a salad much like this in Melbourne in 1982, at a Thai restaurant on Brunswick Street, and I was blown away by the freshness of it all. The heat of the chilli was tempered by palm sugar and highlighted by the mint and coriander. It just reeked of ‘fresh’... if there’s such a thing. Travelling through Thailand 4 years later, I encountered a few different versions, but all with the same basic philosophy of heat, sweet and herbs. I’ve made this many times over the years and at The

Ingredients

Oceania
Australia
Melbourne
Starter
Salad
Spicy

Ingredients

Method