It seems to many that the cooks in Thailand cook exclusively exotic food, wrapping it in banana leaves and pouring milk on young coconuts. In fact, the food in Thailand is quite simple, some chefs even call it banal and eclectic. However, you will not succeed in crunching, for example, with a green juicy cucumber directly from the garden. Tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini squash and many other vegetables cannot boast of crispness and freshness. Cucumbers will be with a thick tasteless skin, and tomatoes in general will seem to us chubby. That is why in Thailand so many and often used a variety of sauces.
Cucumber salad
As we mentioned above, Thai vegetables will always be cooked with lots of sauces. For cooking, you can use rice or soy vinegar, lemon juice, sauce from herbs or bamboo shoots, from the pulp of mango and coconut.
Essential Thai Cucumber Products:
- 320 g of cucumbers;
- a pair of large red onions;
- chili pepper - 2 pcs.;
- a pair of garlic cloves;
- a large spoon of granulated sugar;
- rice vinegar - 1 tbsp. l .;
- it is recommended to take the same amount of soy sauce.
Cooking features
Most Thai salad recipes are based on three main ingredients: nuts, chili peppers and sweet onions. The rest of the set of components can be arbitrary.
In our case, cucumbers are taken as a basis and the classic “trio” is added to them. Vegetables can be cut into circles or long strips, as your imagination suggests. Sugar, soy sauce, rice vinegar are mixed in a separate bowl. You can add here a couple of teaspoons of lime juice or fish vinegar. We mix the ingredients and pour the onions, cut into long feathers, with a mixture.
Finely chop the garlic. Hot pepper is cut in half rings. As you know, vegetables in Thai in most cases are very spicy, but if you are not an amateur, it is better to remove the seeds from pepper. From nuts you can choose ordinary peanuts. It is pre-fried on the dry surface of a very hot pan. To give nuts more flavor and taste, it is recommended to rub them in a mortar.
After mixing all the ingredients, season the salad with the sauce. Such vegetables in Thai can act as an independent dish, and even as a side dish for fish or seafood will be simply excellent.
Seafood salad
Some people associate Thai cuisine with fruits, some with spicy vegetable salads, and some with seafood dishes. If you consider yourself a lover of shrimp, mussels, oysters, squid and other marine life, then we advise you not to miss the next Thai recipe.
What is required:
- 380 g squid;
- 320 g shrimp;
- 45 g rice noodles;
- two tomatoes;
- 4 stalks of celery;
- green onions;
- onions (a pair of pieces at will);
- hot chili pepper - 2 pcs.;
- lime juice - half a glass;
- sugar - 3 tbsp. l .;
- 9 tbsp. l fish sauce;
- nuts to taste.
Description of the cooking process
As you noticed, in this Thai salad recipe there is a “trio”: hot chili peppers, onions and nuts. Without them, as they say, nowhere. And, as in the first case, we are first preparing the gas station. To do this, cook over medium heat sugar syrup from the amount of granulated sugar indicated in the list of ingredients. Thai cuisine is famous for its combination of sweet and savory. This salad is no exception.
Syrup is made from three tablespoons of sugar and 240 ml of water. Then it cools down a bit. Add lime juice and hot chili pepper cut into small rings. It remains to pour the fish sauce in the dressing and mix all the products in the container thoroughly. Leave the dishes, it is necessary to let the sauce brew.
Many Thai recipes are accompanied by the use of seafood. If you take large shrimp for a dish, then be sure to clean the shell, remove the intestines and cut them into two halves. Eating such a large shrimp is uncomfortable. Squids are also cleaned and cut into small portioned circles. Both types of seafood are blanched in boiling water for about two minutes. Remember that you can not overexpose them, otherwise the products will taste like a tire from a bicycle or bike, which is so popular in Thailand.
Cool shrimp with squid, transfer them to a bowl with sauce. cut the sweet onion in half rings. Tomatoes are cut into small cubes, like celery root. Rice noodles are cooked according to the table indicated on the package. As a rule, this also takes about three to five minutes.
We mix all the products in the container where the dressing is located. It remains only to fry the nuts a little and put them in the rest of the salad ingredients.
Tip
No matter what kind of Thai vegetable recipes you will use, do not forget that such dishes are always freshly prepared. It will not work to make the salad in Thai and leave it in the refrigerator until the guests arrive. Done and immediately serve to the table. And the seafood will be softer, and the bright sharpness of the pepper will not go away, and the aroma of freshly squeezed lime will be more saturated. This is not a "herring under a fur coat", this is an overseas exotic.