Nam tok

A whole cut grilled and sliced, dressed in the larb manner but never minced.

Pork. Not vegetarian — contains fish sauce, pork.

Ingredients

• 600 g pork neck, in one piece
• 3 tablespoons fish sauce
• 4 tablespoons lime juice
• 2 teaspoons toasted chilli flakes
• 3 tablespoons toasted rice powder
• 4 shallots, thinly sliced
• 4 spring onions, sliced
• 1 large bunch mint
• 1 bunch coriander
• 1 tablespoon palm sugar

Method

1. GRILLED WHOLE AND SLICED, NEVER MINCED. That is the only structural difference from the larb on this site, and it changes everything: larb is mince poached in water and dressed warm and loose, while this is a piece of meat with a charred crust, rested and cut across the grain, with the dressing coating slices.
2. Pork neck, or any cut with fat marbled through it. Lean pork grills dry in the time it takes to build a crust.
3. Season with 1 tablespoon of the fish sauce and leave it 30 minutes. No long marinade -- the dressing afterwards is where the flavour comes from.
4. HIGH HEAT, TURNED OFTEN, 12 to 15 minutes, until charred in patches outside and just cooked through.
5. The char is not incidental. The dressing is sour and the grilled crust is what it has to push against.
6. REST IT 10 MINUTES before slicing, or the juices run out onto the board instead of into the dressing.
7. Toast the rice powder yourself: raw glutinous rice in a dry pan, 8 to 10 minutes, until deep brown and smelling of popcorn, then pounded to coarse sand.
8. Slice the pork thinly ACROSS the grain, at an angle.
9. Dressing mixed in the bowl -- fish sauce, lime, palm sugar, chilli flakes -- then the warm slices folded through, with any juice from the board.
10. Rice powder, shallots and herbs folded in last, off the heat and almost cool. Serve with sticky rice.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Thailand · All recipes