I improvised this Thai salad for a potluck, and a friend asked me for the recipe.
This is a “choose your own adventure” recipe — I wasn’t following a recipe at all when I made it. Whatever vegetables you have available will probably work. Everything should be adjusted to your preferences. E.g. when I made this, I went light on the hot pepper and offered the shrimp on the side because I knew lots of kids would be eating it.
Ingredients
Dressing
The first 5 ingredients are the quintessential Thai salad dressing. I added salad oil to add body and stretch the dressing, because I had a ton of noodles.
- 1 birdseye chili, stemmed and seeded
- 4 medium cloves of garlic
- 30g of palm sugar, chopped into small pieces (sub turbinado or white if unavailable)
- Juice of 2 limes
- Roughly 2/3 as much fish sauce as lime juice (2-3 tbs maybe?)
- 1/3 cup canola, grapeseed, or other neutral oil
Salad
- 6 oz dried glass noodles or vermicelli
- 1/2 sweet bell pepper, cut into matchsticks
- 1 medium carrot, peeled and cut into matchsticks
- 2 stalks celery, trimmed and thinly sliced along the bias
- 3 oz savoy cabbage, shredded
- 10 cherry tomatoes, quartered
- 4 scallions, whites cut into 1.5 inch pieces and then quartered lengthwise
- 2 Persian cucumber, cut into chopstick sized pieces
- A handful of cilantro leaves
- (optional) 6 oz shrimp, peeled and de-veined
Preparation
Dressing
Stem and seed the bird’s eye chili. Peel and trim the ends of the garlic. Place chili and garlic in a non-porous mortar or a bowl. Pound (not grind) until the pepper is in small pieces and the garlic is a paste. I don’t have a wooden mortar and pestle, so I used a ceramic bowl and a cocktail muddler.
Add palm sugar, and pound, breaking down any big lumps.
Add fish sauce, lime juice, and neutral oil. Pour into a jar with a lid and shake to combine. Taste and adjust to your preferences. It should be almost “too” limey and fish-saucey on its own — this will mellow out when mixed with everything. Let stand while you prep the veggies to help the palm sugar dissolve.
Salad
Put on a pot of water for the noodles and shrimp. Prep a bowl of ice water to chill the shrimp after cooking.
Prep the veggies. This is the most time consuming part. You can use whatever you have available, but I wouldn’t skip: sweet bell pepper, cucumber, cherry tomato. The goal is variety, uniform size, and long, thin, cuts that will mix in with the noodles. E.g. I’ll slice the celery to matchstick width along the bias to get longer pieces. Instead of scallion “rings” I sliced these into 1.5 inch segments and then lengthwise into long thin strips.
When you’re close to wrapping up the veggies, cook the noodles according to package instructions. Drain and run under cold water until chilled. Using kitchen shears, cut into 2-3inch segments. I typically do this by pinching a bundle of noodles in my hand, lifting it up over the salad bowl, and then snipping off segments from the tail, working upwards.
Boil the shrimp until just done, then plunge into ice water to stop the cooking. Let dry and cut into bite sized pieces.
In a large salad bowl, combine noodles, veggies, shrimp. A couple minutes before serving, vigorously shake the dressing until homogeneous, pour over, and mix to combine.