Thai Salads: The Big Overview

Thai Salads

I love Thai salads because they always bring a sense of freshness and a true explosion of flavors. We often have one or more Thai salads for dinner. And when we go out for Thai food with a group and share dishes, we always order at least one Thai salad.

If you think of “salad” exclusively as green leaves and various dressed vegetables, you should adjust your expectations when it comes to Thai salads. Most Thai salads contain or largely consist of meat, fish, or seafood and are prepared with various spices and herbs. Then again, we have our own meat and sausage salads too.

In Thailand, there are many variations of salads, which can be roughly divided into five categories that I will introduce you to below. Regardless of which category a Thai salad belongs to, it will in all likelihood be prepared with fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, and chillies.

These four ingredients span a flavor spectrum of salty with some umami, sour, sweet, and spicy. Some salads, such as the Yum Sadau Gung Sod, also include bitter as a flavor note. The great art of preparing Thai salads lies in balancing these contrasting flavor components, which is actually true of Thai cuisine as a whole.

Below I would like to give you a brief overview of the wonderful world of Thai salads. Although I now know that there are quite a number of lesser-known Thai salads beyond these rather popular ones.

Yum (ยำ)

Salads referred to as “Yum” ( ) are probably the simplest and most common Thai salads. The Thai word “Yum” can be translated as “to mix” or “to blend,” which is exactly what happens during preparation. The same word is also used for the Thai soup Tom Yum, in which mixed ingredients are used.

But back to the salads. Here a main ingredient in the form of meat, fish, seafood, mushrooms, vegetables, noodles, or eggs is mixed with shallots, spring onions, Thai celery, coriander, or other Thai herbs, and often also tomatoes.

Everything is then dressed with a sauce made from fish sauce, lime juice, and sugar. This dressing can also contain additional ingredients such as chillies, garlic, tamarind paste, or shallots. The salad sauce is so typical for this type of salad that it even has its own name, Nam Yum ( ).

There are endless combinations, which means a Yum salad can be made from almost anything. A well-known example is “Yum Mama,” a Thai salad made from instant noodles, minced meat, and sausages.

Examples

A Yum salad can be made from almost any ingredient. I have even dressed smoked pork loin or Landjäger with a dressing of fish sauce, lime juice, and palm sugar.

Laap (ลาบ)

Laap ( ) is a salad made from minced meat that originally comes from neighboring Laos. In Thailand it has developed into two very different regional variants. In the Isaan, the northeast of the country, the version that is best known in the West emerged. Northern Thailand produced its own variant with “Laap Lanna.”

You can also prepare Laap salads using store-bought minced meat, but freshly hand-chopped meat has a different texture and blends better with the other ingredients. In Thailand and Laos, the meat is usually chopped together with the bones, which takes some getting used to for Europeans and is therefore rarely seen in tourist areas.

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Laap Isaan

For the Isaan Laap, meat or fish, often together with spices and herbs, is chopped and then briefly cooked. There are also Laap recipes where the chopped meat is used raw.

Whether raw or cooked, the chopped meat is then dressed with lime juice, fish sauce, coarse chilli powder, and the toasted rice powder Khao Khua and mixed with fresh herbs, especially fresh mint.

Examples

Laap salads can be made from any type of meat or fish that can be chopped with a cleaver. There are also some modern vegetarian versions.

Laap Lanna

or tastes completely different from the Isaan variant. An important ingredient is the dry spice blend , with spices such as Makhwaen, cumin, cloves, and star anise, which gives the dish its characteristic aroma. Lime juice or other forms of acidity play almost no role here.

In its traditional form, Laap Lanna often contains raw meat, offal, and sometimes also blood. If that puts you off, you have little to worry about in modern restaurants, as these preparations are becoming increasingly rare. The name often gives away the preparation method. stands for Laap with cooked meat, for the raw variant, and for the version with blood.

Examples

Nam Tok (น้ำตก)

The Thai word “Nam Tok” ( ) actually means waterfall. Several stories exist about how this grilled meat salad came to have this name. For example, the fat dripping during grilling is said to flow like a waterfall into the fire, the smell of the grilled meat is said to make your mouth water, or the first salad of this type was supposedly served next to a waterfall.

Whatever the origin of the name, in Nam Tok grilled meat, usually pork or beef, is sliced into strips and dressed with lime juice, fish sauce, chillies, a little sugar, and Khao Khua. The whole thing is then served, much like Laap, with fresh herbs and shallots.

With Suea Rong Hai, the “crying tiger,” there is also something like a deconstructed version of Nam Tok, where the meat is served with a spicy dip.

Examples

You can make a Nam Tok salad from practically any meat that you can also grill. There are even Nam Tok variants with grilled mushrooms.

Tam (ตำ)

The Thai word “Tam” ( ) can be translated as “to pound.” It refers to pounding the ingredients in a large clay mortar with a wooden pestle. Here too, the preparation method gives the entire category of salads its name.

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The best-known representative of this category is “Som Tam” (ส้มตำ), the “sour” Tam salad. In this salad, strips of unripe papaya are processed in the mortar together with garlic, chillies, palm sugar, lime, and often other ingredients. Tam salads can also be made from many other ingredients.

When preparing a Tam salad, the hardest and driest ingredients are pounded first, followed by the remaining, softer ingredients. It is important that the softer ingredients, such as pieces of lime, yard-long beans, or tomatoes, are not completely crushed but only pressed. The goal here is not to create a paste, but to blend aromas as well as possible.

Examples

A Tam salad can be made from almost any slightly firmer vegetable, but also from fruit. If you are working with softer fruit or vegetables, you need to be a little more careful when pounding.

Phla (พล่า)

I only became aware of Phla ( ) salads relatively recently. This may be because modern versions of these salads differ only slightly from Yum salads. In addition to the flavor components typical of Yum salads, they have a more intense citrus flavor due to the addition of lemongrass, lemon basil, or simply more lime juice.

In the traditional preparation of Phla salad, however, the more intense citrus flavor comes from the fact that the raw meat or raw fish is cold-cooked in the acidity of limes. This makes Phla comparable to ceviche from Latin America. Cold cooking has gone out of fashion over time, possibly because eating raw meat has become less common in Thailand as well.

Examples

Phla salads can also be made from many ingredients. Traditionally, these should of course also be safe to eat raw.