Where fresh meats fragrance and flavour. This amazing Thai beef salad (Yum Nua) is light, bright and jam packed with Thai flavours. Sweet, sour, salt & spice - it doesn’t get much better than this.
Combine the sugar, fish sauce and pepper and then coat the steak. Leave for 30 minutes to marinade.
To make the dressing
Combine the palm sugar, fish sauce, lime juice, chilli and water and set aside.
To make the salad
Cook the steak in either a frying pan or on a BBQ for 3-4 minutes per side, until nicely charred. Remove from the heat and rest for 10 minutes before slicing into very thin slices. Set aside to cool completely as you make the salad.
Toss together the shallot, cucumber, tomato, red chillies, spring onion, mint and cilantro.Add the beef and half the dressing and gently toss to combine everything.Decant to a serving platter or bowl and scatter over the peanuts. Serve with dressing on the side to drizzle over as you wish.
Serve with sticky or Jasmine rice. Personally I love to serve mine with Vietnamese broken rice, which is Jasmine rice broken into pieces. It's like rice couscous!
Notes
Peeling and seeding cucumber.
Some cucumbers feature more water than others, especially in the centre where the seeds are. To seed a cucumber is easy, just cut in half lengthways and using a teaspoon gently scrape out the seeds and watery centre.Most varieties of cucumber have a tough skin that is better peeled off for this salad, with the exception of English/hothouse cucumber that doesn't need to be peeled.
Other suggestions:
Serving: Serve this salad right away for the best results. Once the salad is dressed, it will crunchy for a couple of hours, but not much longer. It’s at its best fresh – it WILL star OK the fridge for 24 hours, but honestly, just eat it right away!Meats: Yum Nua is the beef version of this salad, but you can also use seafood (scallops, squid, shrimp), pork and chicken too.Vegetables: You can change up the vegetables you use and even make it all-veg by adding a few more - like radishes, celery, beansprouts, raw julienned carrot, mini corn and blanched broccoli.Noodles: You can add cooked (cold) noodles to this salad too. I sometimes add wide or thin rice noodles or on occasion egg noodles. It’ll make for a heartier version.