Simple Thai Seafood Salad

If you love Thai flavours, it's a great cuisine to get confident cooking at home and this is a simple recipe to get you started. Our number one top tip for cooking Thai food is to taste, taste, taste. Creating delicious Thai food is all about balancing flavour. Which you need to create and develop from the start, so get used to tasting often and adjust as you go. Follow our recipe for a delicious guide to recreating this dish.

Ingredients

What Seafood to use -

• Squid tubes - fresh or frozen
• Prawns (shrimp) - heads removed, de-veined.

As ever we recommend you getting to know your local fish monger. Use what's available and most sustainable in your region or select sustainable frozen seafood from a quality supplier. Mussels and scallops will work great in this recipe as well.

For the Nahm jim dressing / Thai salad dressing

• Garlic
• Red chilli's - we recommend one and a half with seeds removed but you can adjust to taste.
• Coriander stalks - these can be roughly chopped, keep the leaves to add to the salad.
• 2 lemons or 3 limes, juice only
• Palm sugar - a great sugar alternative as it contains less glucose and has a lower glycemic index than standard sugar.
• Fish sauce - a fermented fish sauce, popular in Sough East Asia. The liquid has a strong amora but brings delicious balance to the dish.

For the salad

• Mung beans / bean sprouts.
• Cucumber.
• Cherry tomatoes - small and sweet are best but switch with whatever tomatoes are available to you.
• Red chilli- adjust to your taste.
• Red onion - you could switch with spring onions/ scallions.
• Fresh mint and coriander leaves.
• Vermicelli noodles or glass/ rice noodles

Toppings these are optional but we love to sprinkle the finished dish with roasted peanuts and fried shallots for additional layers of flavour and crunch. Yum!

How to make a Thai salad dressing

Authentic Thai food is all about the balance of sweet, sour, spice and salt. Nahm jim dressing is classic Thai and yet simple to make at home. We love to use our pestle and mortar to pound and mix the ingredients together but a mini chopper would work well too. In our recipe we start by creating a paste, pounding the garlic, chilli and coriander together. Then pound in the palm sugar and mix in the lemon / lime juice. Lastly, mix in the fish sauce a little at a time and taste as you go. Fish sauce can be overpowering, so go slowly and adjust to your taste.

3 Steps to creating your Thai salad.

1. Create your Thai salad dressing.
2. Prepare and cook your seafood.
3. Prepare your salad ingredients, assemble all the components and enjoy!