Exciting Salads in Myanmar

One type of food particularly captivated me on my trips through Myanmar. The many salads called , which translates as “mixed by hand”, are truly bursting with flavour.

While the dressing of the salads is usually similar, based on peanut oil, garlic, lime juice, chillies, salt, roasted peanuts or soybeans, sesame seeds and coriander, the other ingredients can vary widely.

You can find fish, chicken, grilled pork, Shan tofu, noodles, rice, ginger, tomatoes, cabbage, limes, pomelo, onions and combinations of several ingredients prepared as salads. The salads are usually served alongside dried shrimps, small chillies and whole garlic cloves so you can season the salad to your own taste.

One of my favourite salads is the Lahpet Thoke, the tea leaf salad. It consists of finely chopped Chinese cabbage, tomatoes and fermented tea leaves. The tea leaves give it a flavour I had never encountered before and find fascinating. That is why I also chose it as my salad at Zou Zou’s Cooking Class and brought back a small supply of the pickled tea leaves.

Also very exciting is the ginger salad made from chopped ginger with many roasted peanuts and soybeans.

But all the other salads are also very, very delicious and well worth trying.

More Information

The excellent YouTube channel OTR Food & History has dedicated an entire episode to salads from Myanmar, where you can learn even more about these fascinating dishes.