Every time I’m pregnant, number 1 on my craving list always seems to be Thai papaya salad. I crave it so much, I always end up eating it for a few days/weeks postpartum. My favorite types of food are salty, tangy, and spicy– beer food! And this salad is the epitome of beer food for me. The reason you can’t eat this while pregnant apparently (according to google) is that there’s too much latex seeping out of the raw papaya. Ripe papaya is okay, but the latex or whatever compounds in the raw papaya apparently can help stimulate your body to give birth before you’re ready. Whether or not this is true, I have no idea. I wonder if Thai women still eat papaya salad while pregnant?
Anyways, here’s my recipe!
Ingredients:
(Sauce)
– Peeled whole garlic
– Thai Peppers
– Shrimp Paste (Mam Ruoc — you can use mam tom too, but we prefer mam ruoc)
– Fermented fish sauce (Mam nem)
– Fish Sauce
– Palm Sugar
– Lime Juice
– Tamarind Pulp
– Sawtooth herb chopped
– Shredded Green Papaya (get green papayas at an Asian store)
– Cherry Tomatoes that are halved
– Quartered Thai Eggplants
– Ba Khia (Raw marinated/fermented crab found in frozen section at Asian grocery stores)
Instructions:
1. In a large mortar and pestle, add a few cloves of garlic, a few thai chili and a teaspoon+ of palm sugar (depends on your preference). Pound this generously so that your sugar is dissolved.
2. Add in a teaspoon of fish sauce, a splash of fermented fish sauce, and a teaspoon or less of shrimp paste. Stir this in vigorously so everything’s dissolved. Add a splash of tamarind pulp and squeeze in some lime. Add a spoon or two of your ba khia juice. Taste and adjust. Our family does not like it sweet, we like it really tangy, spicy, and a little saltier so we can eat it with rice. We add in a bit more shrimp paste and about a lime or 3/4 of one. Ba khia is considered pretty sweet to us so when we use the ba khia sauce, we reduce our palm sugar as well.
3. Add a handful of your halved cherry tomatoes. If you don’t have cherry tomatoes, you can use whatever tomatoes just chop them up to the size of half a cherry tomato. Smash this so that the juice adds to the sauce you’ve created. This will also help mellow out your papaya sauce.
4. Add a handful of shredded papaya and your quartered eggplants and pound. Continue adding your shredded papaya and pounding until you’ve reached your desired ratio of sauce and papaya.
5. Add in your sawtooth herb and pound.
6. Pour out your papaya salad and mix in a few of your crabs in the ba khia. These are super yummy to chew on while eating your papaya salad. This is 100% optional.
** The picture above include blanched shrimps. There is a raw shrimp version of papaya salad where you soak your shrimp in cold salt water for a bit, remove the water and massage the shrimp with all purpose flour to clean the shrimps twice, and wash it again. You can partially cook the shrimp with some lime juice if you choose to eat this with the raw shrimps.
There’s a Vietnamese version to a papaya salad.. All it is shredded papaya with a good fish sauce/nuoc cham . Topped with some herbs like Vietnamese coriander (rau ram), shredded beef jerky or boiled shrimps/pork belly, and chopped roasted peanuts. Papaya just takes on whatever flavor you give it so you can always make do with whatever ingredients you have at home and whatever sauce your family likes.
We love eating our Thai papaya salad with any meat dishes that need some cutting and paired along some nice pork cracklings. Postpartum – I just eat it as is without rice, by the plate! No shame haha. 🙂
Papaya salad is really an easy, versatile dish. Everyone’s got different preferences so it’s hard to give you exact measurements that’ll suit your family. Thai restaurants in America often make it very sweet, and omit a lot of the fermented umami elements that I love about it. But no worries, it’s quick to whip up in a jiffy 🙂