Thai Papaya Salad (Som Tam – ส้มตำ)

I love this salad for the way the simple ingredients interplay. My Thai friend told me that you can judge how good a cook is from their Som Tam’s. The dish is normally cooked in summer.

All the vegetables used in this salad are non-starchy, so besides the dried prawn, everything is actually quite healthy and useful for weight maintenance or weight loss. But I love my dried prawns in there. So, if you are on a diet, leave those out, and the salad will still taste awesome.

In Thailand, there are four main kinds of salads: Yam, Tam, Lap and Phla. The somtam is a ‘tam’ salad, where things are being pounded in a mortar. Therefore, to make this (and other yam salads), it is best to use a mortar, something like this fella:

This recipe is from my Thai cook teacher. Chef Ton was the Culinary Champion in Thailand in 2008. Her food is the best I have ever tasted in Thailand. In all ‘tam’ salads, the sauce is pretty standard mix of fish sauce, lime juice and palm sugar. Everybody has a different preference, so this combination in the recipe is mine. Some people like it sweeter, others saltier and yet others more sour. Adjust according to your taste.

This is how a green papaya looks like, this is the pear shape version, there is also the long, slim ones. Those are sweeter:

green papaya