The perfect way to use up a less than perfect mango, this Thai-inspired salad from Ella Risbridger’s bestselling cook book ‘The Kitchen Book’ is a riot for the senses, in the best possible way. Just add prawns, chicken or enjoy it as it comes.
IMAGE: YUKI SUGIURA
This is (very!) loosely inspired by my go-to Thai order: som tam, papaya salad. You can see just how loosely when I tell you that there is no papaya in this, at all.
This is basically because I find it hard to get hold of good papaya – but it is pretty easy to get hold of ok mango that could do with levelling up: bolshy fish sauce, sweet slippery little prawns, soft bold herbs, big handfuls of lightly pickled peppers and carrots and cucumbers and green beans. Apparently, one of the ways that fast food makes itself irresistible is to hit most of the base flavours at once: salty, umami, sweet. This does the same thing, except for an enormous bowl of mostly vegetables.
If I have a beautiful mango I like to eat it with my face, over the sink, in private; if I have ok mango, the kind that comes pre-sliced, this is the absolutely best thing to do with it. It never tastes more like itself – and never is more appreciated – as part of this wild orchestra of goodness. It is peak summer food: zero cooking, one hundred refreshing. This makes it my go-to grey winter lunch. I seek the opposite of outside: I seek to feel alive!
Herby Mango Salad
Ingredients
- 1 tbsp fish sauce
- 2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
- 1 tbsp caster sugar
- 1 red chilli
- 2 medium carrots
- 3 baby cucumbers (or 1/2 big cucumber)
- 50 g green beans
- 1 long red pepper
- 300 g chopped mango
- 10 g mint
- 10 g Thai basil
- 10 g coriander
- 1 Romaine lettuce
- 150 g cooked prawns or fried tofu; chopped chicken; crispy chicken thighs; whatever
- 30 g chopped roasted peanuts
- 1 lime
- sriracha, if liked
Instructions
- In a much-too-big bowl (it will hold everything!), whisk together the fish sauce, vinegar, and caster sugar until the sugar dissolves. Thinly slice the red chilli and add it too. (Easy to omit if you're not a big spice house.)
- Peel the carrots and use a julienne peeler to turn them into thin, pretty little strips. Toss the carrot strips into the bowl and let marinate for a minute. Halve and thinly slice the cucumbers: if you're using half a big boy, split it in half, and use a teaspoon to drag out the seeds. Discard the seeds, and thinly slice. Toss the cucumbers in with the carrots and stir.
- Chop the raw green beans. If you can do this on the diagonal, so much the better. (Do not forget to take off and discard the stringy ends.) Add them to the bowl too. De-seed and finely slice the pepper, and stir the chopped pepper in as well.
- (This is a good point to stop this part, if you're making in advance.)
- Finely chop the mango into little dice.
- De-stem and finely shred the herbs then shred the lettuce (wash the leaves; stack the leaves; slightly roll the leaves in a bundle; slice the bundle across).
- Mix the leaves, the mango, the prawns into the pickled vegetables.
- Roughly chop the peanuts; quarter the lime. Divide salad into bowls; drizzle with sriracha, if liked; scatter with peanuts; set the lime quarter at a jaunty angle for individual jaunty squeezes.
Notes
The Kitchen Book by Ella Risbridger, 4th Estate, £26, photography by Yuki Sugiura
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