Larb Isaan With Jasmine Rice

A delicious Thai salad with diced chicken and chili peppers

Course Meal

Keyword Thai Pepper

Prep Time 20

Cook Time 10

Servings servings

Calories 500kcal

8 fresh red Thai bird’s eye chilies thinly sliced into discs about 1/8-inch thick, seeds and all. The ones I used were each about 1 ½ inches long.
2 pounds free-range skinless, boneless chicken thighs coarsely chopped to about the same consistency as beef for a burger.
2 red onions medium-sized, peeled, halved, and thinly sliced
1 ounce fresh cilantro roughly chopped, stalks and all
½ ounce fresh mint leaves left whole. These are for garnishing your larb once you’ve plated it.
3 tablespoons fish sauce
3 tablespoons lime juice
4 tablespoons water

1 cup jasmine rice cooked according to the instructions on the pack. (That usually means using 1 ¼ cups of water for 1 cup of rice.)
1 teaspoon ground sea salt for the rice’s cooking water

1 cos lettuce medium-sized, with the stem and any limp outer leaves removed. Separate the leaves so you have 3 crisp bowl-like leaves for each person – 12 leaves in total. I’d use cos lettuce particularly because the leaves are nice and firm and they make a grand ‘bowl’ for the chicken.
1 English cucumber medium-sized, cut into sticks about 3 inches long and 1 inch wide.

2 fresh limes medium-sized, each cut into quarters
4 fresh red Thai bird’s eye chilies thinly sliced into discs about 1/8-inch thick, seeds and all. Put the slices into a pretty little dish so folks can sprinkle a few over their chicken at the table.

I’d start with this because you want the toasted rice to be ground and ready for adding to the chicken right at the end of its cooking.
Set a medium-size saucepan on a medium heat and add the 2 tablespoons uncooked rice. Stir the rice regularly as is toasts over that medium heat until all the grains take on a dark golden color. That’ll take about 7 minutes, but be watchful here so as not to burn the rice.
Take the pan off the heat and turn the toasted rice into a bowl so it can cool for a couple of minutes before you coarsely grind it. To do that, I used an electric spice/coffee grinder, but you could use a pestle and mortar. You’ll find that the toasted rice is far more brittle than raw rice, which means that it grinds to a coarse powder surprisingly quickly.

I used a heavy, deep-sided 12-inch skillet for this, but a similarly broad saucepan will be fine.
Set the skillet on a medium heat and add the water. As soon as the water starts to simmer, drop the heat to low-medium and thoroughly stir in the chopped chicken and 1 tablespoon oriental fish sauce. (The other 2 tablespoons of fish sauce are going to be added a little later.)
Keep stirring gently as the chicken cooks on that low-medium heat for 2 minutes.
Now stir in the chilies, red onion, and cilantro. Keep stirring the mix gently for another 2 minutes on low-medium.
Turn off the heat and add 2 tablespoons fish sauce, the lime juice, and the ground, toasted rice. Give the mixture a good stir so that everything is well combined – that’s it, the chicken is done.
You can now let the chicken cool to about room temperature while you prep the lettuce and cucumber, so they’re ready for serving with your larb isaan.

On each person’s plate, arrange the leaves attractively so that one leaf can be filled with its fair serving of the chicken.
Now spoon the warm chicken into your chosen ‘leaf bowl’ and set a few sticks of cucumber around the plate, along with two quarters of the fresh limes.
Add a nicely formed mound of sticky rice to each plate and then sprinkle a few of the mint leaves over the chicken.
Your larb isaan is now ready to serve alongside your little bowl of garnishing chillies so that fire-loving folks can help themselves.