How to make street vendor larb and som tum salads

Thanks to the creativity and resourcefulness of street vendors, they're able to prepare an incredible assortment of freshly-cooked meals right in front of your home. The lady in this video is a very good example of this, as she has an entire cooking cart connected to a motorcycle which buzzes around a local housing community. She even has a charcoal barbeque on the tail end, as you can see, and her cart is just packed with good things to eat. She moved quick in the preparation of the larb and somtum. Follow along in this Thai vendor cooking how-to video to learn how to prepare larb and som tum. Som tum is a green papaya salad.

Larb is one of our all-time favorite Thai dishes, and it is a very common dish served throughout Thailand as well as Laos. It's quick to make and often extremely spicy, but the lime juice and mint leaves make for an exotic and splendid combination. It can be found on Thai restaurant menus in America as "chicken salad Thai style", which might be the best description for this dish. Larb it pronounced "lawb" and that means salad. It can be made with beef (lawb nuea) or pork (lawb muu) instead of chicken. You can make a more fancy lawb by adding beanthread noodles.

Larb ingredients:
1 lb ground chicken
2 tablespoons sliced shallot
2 tablespoons finely chopped spring onion
1/4 cup chopped mint leaves
3 tablespoons roasted rice powder (khao koor)
2 tablespoons ground Thai chile (be sure to use real Thai ground chile)
3 tablespoons lime juice
2-3 tablespoons fish sauce

Ingredients for Som Tum:
2 cups shredded fresh green papaya, use a Pro-Slice Thai peeler or Miracle Knife.
3 medium roma tomatoes, or use a few more if you can find cherry tomatoes
A handful of fresh string beans cut into 1 inch pieces
2 tablespoons dried shrimp
4-6 fresh Thai chiles, remove stems
3-4 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons palm sugar
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons juice of pickled mud fish (optional)