Thai Beef Salad

Thai Home-Cooking, by William Crawford and Kamolmal Pootaraksa, Penguin, 1985.

This is a good spicy way to make flank steak go a little farther.

Ingredients

1 Recipe Flank Steak (1 lb)
4 Serrano or Jalapeno Chillies
1 medium cucumber
1 cup red onion
1 head romaine or iceberg lettuce
1/4 plus 2T lime juice
1T fish sauce
2t sugar
1 bunch green onions, white and green parts
1 cup coriander sprigs

Directions

Make the flank steak recipe, and slice the beef across the grain into strips 1/8 inch thick and 1-2 inch long. Remove the stems and seeds from the chillies and chop them finely. Peel the cucumber and slice it diagonally into pieces 1/8 inch thick. Peel the red onion, remove the root portion and slice the onion vertically into paper-thin slices. Slice the lettuce into pieces about 1 inch wide. Chop the green onions diagonally into pieces 1 inch long.

Mix the lime juice, fish sauce, and sugar in a small bowl. Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Fix as a salad: Lettuce on the bottom. Next, meat, chillies, cucumber and onion. Next, use the juice mixture as a dressing. Garnish with the green onion and chopped coriander sprigs. They suggest serving with rice.

Comments

The recipe says to leave the seeds in the chillies. It was way hot. If that's what you want, leave the seeds in.
They had a different way of making the steak -- marinate it with coriander root and black pepper. It was not as good as the flank steak recipe in this book.

Jim Plank

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