Som Tam (Green Papaya Salad)
Shredded unripe papaya pounded with lime, chilli, palm sugar and fish sauce. No cooking at all, and it takes ten minutes.
Nutrition Info (per serving)
- 180
- Calories
- 7g
- Protein
- 6g
- Fat
- 27g
- Carbs
Ingredients
- 1 small green papaya (about 400 g shredded)
- 2 cloves garlic
- 4 bird's eye chillies
- 2 tbsp dried shrimp
- 3 tbsp roasted peanuts
- 100 g green beans
- 150 g cherry tomatoes
- 3 tbsp fish sauce
- 3 limes
- 2 tbsp palm sugar
- 1 tbsp tamarind paste
Instructions
- 1Peel the green papaya, halve it and scrape out the white seeds. Shred the flesh into long thin strips with a julienne peeler or a coarse grater, then rinse in cold water and drain well.
- 2Trim the green beans and cut them into 3 cm lengths. Halve the cherry tomatoes.
- 3Put the garlic and chillies in a large mortar and pound them into a rough paste. If you have no mortar, chop them very finely and mix everything in a large bowl using a wooden spoon to bruise as you go.
- 4Add the dried shrimp and half the peanuts and pound briefly, just enough to break them up.
- 5Add the palm sugar, fish sauce, tamarind paste and the juice of the limes. Stir and pound lightly until the sugar has dissolved into the dressing.
- 6Add the green beans and pound gently a few times to bruise them — this lets them take up the dressing instead of sitting in it.
- 7Add the tomatoes and pound two or three times only, enough to release some juice without turning them to pulp.
- 8Add the shredded papaya and switch to folding: press with the pestle and turn with a spoon so the strands bruise slightly and absorb the dressing without breaking.
- 9Taste and balance — sour, salty, sweet, hot, in that order of loudness. Serve immediately, scattered with the remaining peanuts.
Som tam is made to order in a clay mortar on almost every street in Thailand, and the sound of the pestle is how you find the stall. It is also one of the few genuinely great dishes that involves no cooking whatsoever.
Green papaya is a vegetable
Unripe papaya has none of the sweetness or musk of the ripe fruit. It is firm, faintly grassy and almost neutral, closer to a hard cucumber, which is exactly what makes it a good carrier for a dressing this loud.
If you cannot find it, the usual substitutes are shredded green mango, kohlrabi, or a firm cucumber with the watery seeds removed. Carrot works at a push but brings its own sweetness.
Rinsing the shreds after cutting washes off the milky sap, which can be slightly bitter.
Pound, do not toss
The mortar is not decoration. Bruising the beans, tomatoes and papaya breaks cell walls so the dressing goes into the vegetables rather than pooling at the bottom of the bowl. A salad that has been tossed tastes like dressed papaya; one that has been pounded tastes seasoned all the way through.
The order matters too. Hard things first — garlic, chilli, peanuts, beans — then soft things, then the papaya last with a light hand. Pound the papaya as hard as the garlic and you get a wet mush.
Balancing the four flavours
Every som tam is adjusted at the moment of making, and no two stalls make it the same. The frame is:
- Sour from lime and tamarind, and it should lead
- Salty from fish sauce
- Sweet from palm sugar, in the background rather than forward
- Hot from fresh chillies, which is the one to adjust to taste
Taste before you serve. If it tastes muddy, it usually needs lime. If it tastes sharp and thin, it usually needs sugar.
Dried shrimp
These are small, salty, intensely savoury and available in any Asian grocer. They add a depth that is difficult to replace, though the salad is still good without them. Leave them and the fish sauce out and add extra lime and a pinch of salt for a vegan version.
Nutrition
Around 180 calories a serving with a lot of vitamin C from the papaya and lime, plus vitamin A and a good amount of fibre. The peanuts bring most of the fat and some protein.
It does not keep — the papaya weeps and goes limp within an hour — so make what you will eat.
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