Recipes

Bright, bold, and better than anything you'll order in a restaurant

Thai beef salad — yam nua — is one of the most vivid, flavourful salads in the world. Thinly sliced cooked beef dressed in lime, fish sauce, chilli, and toasted rice powder, scattered with fresh mint and coriander. The key is to cook the beef to medium-rare and slice it very thin. The round, when treated correctly, is ideal — its clean, lean flavour lets the dressing take centre stage without competing.

A main-course salad with genuine substance and serious flavour

Warm beef salad sits in that ideal space between a proper dinner and a light meal — substantial enough to feel like a main course, fresh enough to feel virtuous. The topside steak, pan-seared and sliced thin, works beautifully here: its lean, clean flavour is a perfect counterpoint to the bitterness of rocket and the sweetness of roasted capsicum.

Bold, fresh, bright — a 20-minute dinner that punches well above its weight

Larb is a Thai and Laotian minced meat salad seasoned with fish sauce, lime, toasted rice powder, and fresh herbs. It is one of those dishes that is simultaneously the simplest thing you can make and one of the most flavourful. The toasted rice powder — made from dry-toasting raw rice in a pan until golden, then grinding — is the secret ingredient that gives larb its nutty, slightly smoky depth.