Green Papaya Salad – Som Tam – ส้มตำ
Green papaya salad is a dish that originates in Laos and is an important dish in Thai cuisine. It is closely associated with the cooking of northeastern (Isan) Thailand but can be found all over the country. You can eat papaya salad at fancy restaurants, dusty roadside shacks, street stalls, and even on the beach.
Preparing this dish is simple. Unripe papaya is shredded and lightly pounded in a mortar and pestle with garlic, chilies, fish sauce, lime juice, tomatoes, peanuts, and a few other ingredients and seasonings. It is salty, sour, spicy, funky, and slightly sweet. There are countless variations with many different additional ingredients such as salted egg and raw crab but this is the “basic” (but still delicious!) version. Papaya salad is often served with sticky rice and it happens to be part of one of my favorite meal combinations of all time… Isan-style grilled chicken, papaya salad, and sticky rice.
Ingredients
A few ingredients may be tricky to find depending on where you live. Green papaya is simply unripe papaya. It is much firmer than ripe papaya and is not very sweet. Its texture is more akin to shredded carrot, but without the carrot flavor. Green papaya is a bit bland on its own which makes it such a great vehicle for all the other flavors in the salad. Green papaya can sometimes be found in western grocery stores but I usually have more luck in Asian markets.
Tamarind is usually found in three forms here in the US… jarred prepared tamarind, packaged tamarind pulp, and whole tamarind pods. If you find prepared tamarind, you don’t need to do anything more to it, it is ready to use in most recipes. If you find tamarind pulp (or whole tamarind pods), you need to take a small piece of the pulp and put it in a bowl with an equal amount of warm water. Let it sit for a few minutes. Using your hands, massage the tamarind pulp until it starts to loosen up. Keep adding water and massaging until an apple sauce consistency is achieved.
Pounding the salad
Pounding green papaya salad in a mortar and pestle helps to release a lot of the juices and flavors from many of the ingredients and integrates the seasonings more thoroughly. The vegetables also get lightly bruised and soften up a bit, which improves the texture of the dish. Papaya salad is traditionally pounded in a large-ish clay and wood mortar and pestle. While I would love to have one of these mortars, I really don’t have space in my small kitchen for more equipment and it is easy to replicate the technique using a smaller granite mortar and pestle and a mixing bowl. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle at all, you could smash the aromatics with the side of your knife on a cutting board and then use any blunt instrument (such as a rolling pin) to mix and bruise up the vegetables in a mixing bowl
Goes well with:
Green Papaya Salad – Som Tam – ส้มตำ
Equipment
- Mortar and Pestle
Ingredients
- 1/3 of a whole green papaya (2 generous cups shredded green papaya)
- 1.5 Tbsp dried shrimp (optional but recommended)
- 2 medium cloves garlic, cut in half
- 3 or 4 red thai bird chilies, stem removed and cut into 1/4 inch pieces
- 1 Tbsp sugar (or palm sugar)
- 3 Tbsp fresh lime juice (reserve one of the limes after squeezing its juice)
- 2 Tbsp prepared tamarind **see note**
- 2/3 cup halved cherry tomatoes
- 2/3 cup long beans, cut into 1-inch sections (could substitute conventional green beans if necessary)
- 1.5 Tbsp fish sauce
- 1/3 cup roasted peanuts
Instructions
- Peel about half of the green papaya. One whole papaya will yield a lot of shredded papaya. I like to peel the portion that I will be using and keeping the rest unpeeled so it stays fresh in the refrigerator, wrapped in plastic wrap.
- While being very careful, and possibly using a towel to protect the hand you are holding the papaya with, use a sharp knife to make lots of cuts about 1/2 inch deep all over the peeled section of papaya.
- The cuts should all run lengthwise in the same direction and be closely spaced together.
- Use the knife to cut away from you and "shave" the papaya so that shredded bits of papaya fall away onto the cutting board. This may take a bit of practice. You want there to be a little variance in the size of the shreds. Don't shave the papaya extremely finely or the texture will not be as pleasant and the salad will be overly soggy.
- Keep shredding and turning the papaya until you have shredded the papaya almost down to the seeds in the center. You will probably need to make fresh cuts into the papaya after you have shaved off some of the outer parts of the papaya. You want to yield 2 generous cups of shredded papaya.
- Place the dry shrimp into the mortar and pestle and pound them until they start to break apart and get a bit fibrous.
- Add the garlic, bird chilies, and sugar to the mortar and pestle and pound into a rough paste. Don't make this paste super fine.
- Cut the reserved, already squeezed lime into 4 pieces and put it in a mixing bowl along with the shredded papaya, cut long beans, and halved tomatoes.
- Add the contents of the mortar and pestle to the mixing bowl along with 3 Tbsp lime juice, 1.5 Tbsp fish sauce, and 2 Tbsp prepared tamarind. Use the pestle from your mortar and pestle or any other heavy blunt utensil such as a rolling pin and pound the ingredients in the salad while mixing. The tomatoes should be releasing their juices and the papaya should be slightly bruised. Lightly pound the pieces of lime to expel some of the oils from their skins (the pieces of lime will be the only inedible component in the salad).
- Add the peanuts to the mixing bowl.
- Give the salad a light final pound to just break up some of the peanuts and mix well. Adjust seasoning if necessary with more fish sauce, lime juice, or sugar. Salad should be salty, sour, spicy, and with a very light sweetness… just enough to soften up the other aggressive flavors.
- Serve the papaya salad with sticky rice.
