Papaya Salad

With origins in Lao cuisine and further popularized through Thai menus in America, Southeast Asian green papaya salad can vary in terms of ingredients as well as spice level. I’ve had ones that were more sweet than spicy, as well as ones so spicy and painfully delicious that I could not feel my face a few bites in. This is why there is a range for chiles in the recipe below: make it as spicy as you’d like, so long as you can enjoy it fully.

One way or another, there has to be some fermented seafood element to give depth to the spicy chiles. There are papaya salads that use little brined crabs and dried shrimps, but in its most basic iteration, there has to be a good amount of fish sauce. This recipe calls for optional balacan, a type of fermented shrimp paste. Together with acid (usually lime juice) and sweetness (usually palm sugar) and some raw garlic, this very simple dressing forms the foundation of flavor in papaya salad.

When picking your papaya for this salad, just make sure you’re choosing a green fruit. At its unripened stage, it is crunchy and a refreshingly blank canvas flavorwise: it has none of the tropical sweetness a ripened yellow papaya has. When it comes to prepping the fruit into fine shreds, a mandolin or specialized julienne peeler can help. A popular method involves holding the peeled papaya in one hand and hacking at it with a knife in the other to make fine shreds, but after witnessing the avocado hands phenomenon, I just can’t advise you to do that. 

You can just go slow and steady and use this as an opportunity to work on your knife skills. Peel the papaya, cut it in half, remove the seeds as you would a pumpkin, and slice the fruit into very thin slices about ⅛”-thick. Stack your slices about 3 or 4 high, and julienne them as thinly as you can. No worries if you’ve got shreds of different thicknesses! That rustic and organic variation will contribute to fun textures in every bite, and we’ll pound them all until tender anyway.

Traditionally made in a large mortar and pestle where all ingredients are pounded together, this version is a bit of a shortcut for home kitchens that might not have special tools: grate or mince the garlic, finely chop the peanuts and chiles, and just stir everything in a bowl until they start to mash together a bit. If you can’t find longyard beans, substituting fresh green strings beans is perfectly okay!

This salad is best when served alongside fresh homemade sticky rice, which offers a sweet counterbalance to the spicy licks of chile fire. Once you’ve made this recipe, drop us a comment down below and let us know your thoughts!