How to Make Authentic Thai Papaya Salad (Som Tam)

If this video gets a certain amount of views, we'll do a 10 chili sometime, and 20, and so on and so forth, until we reach a million subscribers. Welcome back to the School of Wok channel. Chef Ian here today with the wonderful... Thank you, Ian. Chef Lance from School of Wok. It worries me that you didn't expect a compliment from me. I'm always complimenting Lance. What are we doing today, Lance? We're making, obviously, delicious Thai papaya salad, som tam. This is such a crucial dish at the School of Wok. This is part of our most popular menu. It's a customer favourite, it's a student favourite, and it's a staff favourite as well, I'd say. We're gonna make the classic papaya version today, but we'll talk about variations as we go along. Lance, how are you with spice? Love it, as spicy as you want, Ian. First things first, I'm gonna ask you, can you peel this for us, and we'll go from there. So we're using unripe green papaya, so this is young papaya, has that really nice crunch. It's quite plain in terms of flavour, but it's there to be a carrier of the dressing that we're gonna make. If people can't find papaya, what's your favourite kind of swap here? Favourite swap, maybe green mango, or a ticket to Bangkok. A ticket to Bangkok, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a chef that comes to the school and does class every now and then called Yui Miles. She actually told me she uses swede, because it has that kind of like dull, sweet crunch to it. I think that kind of really worked for this salad. While Lance has just finished those off, I'll take you through the rest of our ingredients. So we've got our bird's eye chillies. We're gonna talk in a minute about how spicy we're gonna go. We've got garlic and we've got lime. These are gonna consist in our dressing. And then the other ingredients, we've got some cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes are gonna have a really nice bit of like sweetness, acidity, but also an important amount of moisture to the salad. Green beans. Traditionally in Thailand, they would use what's called a snake bean, which is a little bit longer and a little bit thicker. But green beans is an easy substitute, easier to find in the UK. And we've got some dried shrimp. So for that funky, fermented. Savouriness. Savouriness, flavour. Gonna just start by chunking this down a little bit. So it's just a little bit more manageable to use. Sometimes these will be filled with seeds. So there's a couple of seeds in there, Lance, if you can get rid of those. So Lance, I've seen videos of Thai chefs doing this, street food in Thailand. And what they seem to do is take a massive chunk of the papaya, a massive knife, and just like fire the knife into the papaya. And then come down through and shave a little bit off at a time. Bit by bit. That is really smart. Now- They don't need a chopping board. They don't even need a chopping board. It can be done at the side of the road, on the beach. Obviously guys, I'm not advocating anybody give that a go at home. And we're going to do a much more sensible option. But I find the julienne peeler can be a little bit clunky. So Lance, the way we're going to do this today, we're going to do the classic way, which is just to cut some strips and make some julienne pieces. Okay, so square it all up. Come through thin strips. Take a few of these at a time. Then come back through, get some nice thin matchstick pieces. I do think the thinner the better. For me personally. I do agree. You don't want them to be super thick and too crunchy. I always think, if there's something you can use a cleaver for instead of using a gadget, then I prefer doing it with a cleaver. So you've got your nice thin shards of your papaya ready to go. Perfectly uniformed. Couple of other little things. We're just going to peel the garlic. Just peeling? Just peeling for now. And I'm going to put everything on a pile on this plate. With the green beans, we're just going to cut into some chunks. So two or three pieces is fine. Keep everything chunky. And then with the tomatoes, we just need to cut in half. If there's one thing I know about sometimes is it's a really good dish for like, cooling yourself down. Cooling yourself down. Because the idea is, those chilies- Make you sweat. Make you sweat, right? Exactly. Right, what we're going to do is just cut our lime. We're going to do it in quite a specific way, Lance. Yeah. So we want to take that core out. So I'm just going to do my- Just top and tail again? Top and tail. First cut down the middle. No core in the way. We put the cut side face down, angle across. Then you can go in there and cut your core out. Nice. And when you squeeze your lime later, you're going to get all the juice out. Now, decision time, Lance. How many chilies? Four? Five? All of them. Six? Okay. Trying to kill me. Let's go- Five? Let's go five. So just going to roughly chop this down. And like I say, we're going to make a paste with that and the garlic to start. Wow. This one's quite different. Mm-hmm. So this is different from the normal granite type. So this is clay and this is wood. Reason being is we're not trying to like pulverize, right? Pulverize. I didn't know that word. Pulverize. We're like gently bruising. Okay. So Lance, I'm going to start you off with the chili and the garlic. Okay? Yeah. So chili and garlic in. Crush it? You could just crush it. Yeah. And make it into a really rough paste. You know, I always worry about a bit of chili flying into your- Yes. Jumping into your eyes. Yeah. But the best thing to do if you get chili in your eye is to squeeze lime juice in there. Apparently it's meant to nullify the chili. Make it worse. So palm sugar's got that lovely butterscotch sweetness to it. And I'm going to add the lime juice as well, Lance. Yeah. Just a sec. And what I want you to do is just use the lime juice to help dissolve the sugar into that paste. Your ratios here are important because what you're looking for is a balance of salty, sour, savoury, sweet, and spicy. Ooh. Look at that. The colour's great. Right in the eye. I don't know if- No. Not right in the eye. Okay, so our next one going in is tamarind. So tamarind, also sour. So the way I describe this in terms of the lime and the tamarind is if the lime is like a high note, like... Ah! Then tamarind is like a rich, low note, like... Oh. Exactly. So both sour, both sour, but sour in different ways, bringing slightly different types of sour to the dressing. So this is looking great. Final thing is our fish sauce. Now, usually we just use normal, regular fish sauce. So the kind that's made from anchovies, you see filtered, it's quite light in terms of its colour and very thin. Today, we're going super traditional. We're going to use the plara, which is made from the pickled fish, is thicker, is... Hazier. Hazier, is more funky, umami, delicious, rotten flavour. Rotten flavour. I use that word with all the love in my heart. Like, I love fish sauce and you really want it to be kind of funky. This was bought by our camera person, Emmys. Nanny. On the TikTok shop in Thailand. There you go. When you're on holiday, get on the TikTok shop, bring home a bottle of this. So this is going in. And we're doing roughly equal proportions. So two tablespoons of that, two tablespoons of the sugar, one tablespoon-ish of the lime, one tablespoon-ish of the tamarind. Starting with the green beans and the tomatoes. You might want to do this in two batches if you've got a smaller pestle and mortar at home. But just gently bruise and crack those. Just gently. And the idea here, like if you imagine the surface of the green bean, as you kind of bruise it, it's just opening the surface up and allowing that dressing to kind of permeate through. So we're going to do the same thing with the papaya lance. We'll do it gradually, so maybe a third at a time. And you use the spoon to kind of mix at the same time. This is bold, strong flavours. This is as close to rock and roll as you can get with a salad. Final things going in. Dried shrimp. You don't really need to bash these. You can, but we're just kind of mixing through. And I'm going to go in with about half of this amount of the crushed peanut as well. Save a little bit for the top. Mix it through. And we're ready to serve. My mouth's watering. My eyes are burning. One spicy Som Tam papaya salad. Five chillies. Ready to go. Let's tuck in. Have a try. Coriander again. It is spicy. It is spicy, but there's a lot going on with the flavour. There's a sweetness, the sourness, like the funkiness from the fish sauce. Yeah. I think it tastes really different from the version we use, the clear fish sauce. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got a deep funkiness and savouriness into it. One of the nice things in the salad you want is this little bit of dressing that sort of pulls at the bottom. Traditionally, we would use some steamed sticky rice to get in and like dabble that up. That's it, guys. Our spicy Som Tam. It's hot. It's refreshing. It's complex and it's delicious. Lance, if people have enjoyed this video and they want to give it a like, what do they do? Please do comment, like our videos and subscribe our channel. We will see you. You say it. We will see you. Together, both of us. We'll see you. Together, both. Next time.