Thai · Salad
Larb Gai
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, with warmth in the tail.
Ingredients
- 400g ground chicken
- 2 tbsp uncooked sticky rice, toasted and ground (khao khua)
- 3 tbsp lime juice, 2 tbsp fish sauce
- Chili flakes, shallots, scallions
- Mint by the handful
- Lettuce cups, sticky rice
The skills inside
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Toast rice in a dry pan to deep gold; grind coarse.
- Cook chicken with a splash of water, breaking fine.
- Dress warm with lime, fish sauce, chili.
- Fold in herbs and rice powder just before serving.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes
- A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
- It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
- It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
- It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
- The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.
Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Limeade or young coconut
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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