We’re deep into winter squash, apple, and sweet potato season. Although winter is my favorite time to be in NYC, February is when I start craving a bit of sunshine (or at least a tomato). Luckily, when I need something bright and summery, this easy Issan-style beef laap uses ingredients I can find year-round. It pulls me out of the butternut squash blues with its sharp lime dressing and loads of fresh herbs.
Laap is a category of chopped dishes in Thailand and neighboring Laos that has countless variations. It traditionally incorporates offal, skin, and meat, all hand-chopped until very fine, before cooking with several aromatics and/or spices (and sometimes blood) specific to the region and the cook. The version we’re most familiar with in the US is a riff on the style found in Issan, where chopped meat is cooked and then dressed with Thai chilies, fish sauce, and lime juice. (Although in most Thai restaurants and recipes here in the states, the dish starts with ground meat, skipping the chopping part entirely.) It’s then topped with a nutty powder of toasted rice and served alongside a variety of herbs, crudité, and steamed sticky rice.
My simplified version, which is more inspired by what you’d order at a restaurant in the US rather than anything truly authentic, is a punchy but light meal that comes together in a snap. I use ground beef here, but you can use any other kind of ground meat, chopped shrimp, or chopped lean white fish. I cook my meat gently so that it stays tender and acts as a sponge for the real star of this dish, the dressing. I know that with Western cooking, you almost always look for lots of browning on ground meat, but with laap the goal is to get little to no color, which will actually muddy the flavors and leave you with a dry laap.
The tried-and-true combo of fish sauce, chilies, lime juice, and sugar is what beams my winter blues away. This dish presents those ingredients in perfect balance: the fish sauce brings funky umami, the chilies a fiery heat, the lime juice the jolt of acidity, and the sugar keeps everybody else in check. It’s a great dressing to practice seasoning with—keep playing with each of those elements until you find the perfect balance for yourself. I like to use this dressing in everything from coleslaw, to rice bowls, to noodles. Since lime juice goes bad so quickly, it isn’t something that I make in large batches; don’t keep it for longer than two days.
Traditionally, the herbs for laap are served on the side, but I prefer to toss them right into the meat to make it easier to eat in lettuce wraps. I also like how the herbs slightly wilt and perfume the salad from the warmth of the meat. You don’t need to use the exact mix of herbs I have. This would be equally delicious with a mixture of chives, dill, cilantro, or any other soft herbs you forgot about in your vegetable drawer.
And are you wondering about larb, laab, larp, lahp, lob, and lop? Yes, they are all referring to the same chopped meat dishes. I think Andy Ricker explains it best in his cookbook Pok Pok (a great resource for anyone who wants to learn more about Thai cooking):
I’ve heard of laap before. Like most adventurous eaters in the US, I recognized it as a sort of minced meat “salad,” the Thai menu staple often transliterated as “larb.” (The spelling seems like a mistake, since speaking the Thai word requires no r sound at all. My hunch is that this spelling was a Brit’s doing: Say “larb” in an English accent and you’re pretty close to the proper pronunciation.)
Easy Issan-Style Beef Laap
serves 2 to 4 | active time: 30 minutes | total time: 30 minutes
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