This classic Thai som tam recipe makes the popular Thai green papaya salad that you’ll eat on the streets of Thailand. The spicy salad originated in northeastern Thailand’s Isaan region, but now you’ll find this street food favourite all over Thailand, and right across northern Southeast Asia. I also provide some tips below for jazzing up a basic som tam.
When we’re not testing Cambodian recipes for our cookbook, we’re making the food from the countries we love and have lived in, including neighbouring Thailand and Vietnam. Not long after finishing my Vietnamese caramelised fish leftovers with steamed rice and loads of fresh dill yesterday, I was reaching into the fridge…
We had a green papaya and cherry tomatoes that had to be used up, so I set about making my favourite Thai som tam recipe. It’s a classic green papaya salad that we adapted from David Thompson’s Thai Street Food, which can easily be jazzed up.
As I pounded the pestle against the mortar I found myself recalling a road trip many years ago through Thailand’s Isaan region. Isaan and Isan mean ‘northeast’ in Thai and Khmer, and it’s a region that was historically part of the Khmer Empire.
We were there to work on a story about the region’s Khmer Empire temples and lunch stops were spent tucking into Isaan food, such as grilled chicken or gai yang and fiery som tam. I’ll tell you more about som tam in a moment, but first I have a favour to ask.
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Thai Som Tam Recipe for a Green Papaya Salad and Tips to Jazzing Up Som Tam
This classic Thai som tam recipe makes the popular Thai green papaya salad that you’ll find made on the streets of Thailand. Although you’ll hear the ‘pok pok pok pok’ sound of som tam ingredients being pounded in an enormous mortar and pestle before you actually see the som tam stall.
Although Thai som tam originated in Thailand’s Isaan region, and many of you would automatically associate pounded green papaya salads with Thailand, the fiery salad is not unique to the country. Papaya salads are found right across northern Southeast Asia, from Myanmar to Vietnam, and they share more similarities than differences.
You’ll also come across green papaya salads in Laos, where the Lao people call their pounded salad a tum som and it’s practically considered the national dish in Laos. The Lao people believe that tum som originated in Laos from where it travelled south to northeastern Thailand. The history is more complicated than that of course.
Here in Cambodia, there’s also a green papaya salad called bok lahong, and all manner of pounded salads, which are very old, such as bok svay, a pounded mango salad. They’re called ‘boks’ in Khmer. ‘Bok’ and ‘pok’ are ancient Khmer words that mean to smash or beat against something.
I’ll tell you more about that history in our Cambodia cookbook and culinary history when it’s published. For now, just a few tips to making this classic Thai som tam recipe as it’s really very easy.
Tips for Making this Classic Thai Som Tam Recipe for a Thai Green Papaya Salad
I only have a few tips for making this classic Thai som tam recipe as it’s a cinch to make and comes together quickly. The basic Thai som tam recipe I use was adapted from David Thompson’s Thai Street Food cookbook (link above).
I’ve only adjusted the order of prepping the salad a little (I recommend making the dressing first so the flavours meld together), a couple of ingredient amounts (for instance, I like a lot more cherry tomatoes than David), along with instructions (I prefer some of the ingredients to be more lightly pounded so the salad isn’t too wet – which is how most Thais like it; it’s not them, it’s me.
I don’t think those changes would horrify the chef, however, as som tam is very much a bespoke salad. There are infinite variations, not only from region to region, city to city, town to town, village to village, but from cook to cook and customer to customer, because som tam is a salad that’s meant to be customised to your preferences and tastes.
When we published posts on Isaan food from that road trip almost a decade ago, we pointed out that when you see a customer talking to a som tum cook at length while she pounds her salad, they’re not gossiping nor chatting about the weather. They’re discussing how the customer wants her som tum and the cook is making it to order – which is why it’s also perfectly acceptable to jazz up your som tum. More on that below.
To make this Thai som tam recipe, you will need an enormous mortar and pestle. I’ve seen som tam cooks use both wooden mortar and pestles and terracotta or clay mortar and pestles. We use a wooden mortar and pestle as we haven’t found a clay mortar and pestle that is large enough.
Don’t even think about making this in a blender or food processor. It’s just not the same. It seriously doesn’t take long to pound this salad by hand in a mortar. It will take you longer to wash your blender or food processor. And a bonus is that your arms will get a good work out.
We often get asked about fish sauce. As this is a Thai som tam recipe, re suggest using a good quality Thai fish sauce. We recommend Thailand’s Megachef for the quality as much as the consistency, especially when it comes to sodium levels.
For the palm sugar, we use a creamy organic Cambodian palm sugar made by a family about a 20-minute drive down the road, but if you can get hold of some, use a Thai palm sugar, in cream, tablet or granular form. If you live outside Southeast Asia, check your nearest Asian market or Asian supermarket. You can also buy palm sugar online, or use brown sugar, coconut sugar, raw or white sugar.
How to Jazz Up a Basic Thai Som Tam Recipe
You can really add anything to your basic Thai som tam recipe to jazz it up and don’t let anyone tell you any different.
I’ve eaten som tam in Southeast Asia with pork belly, roast pork, bacon, shredded chicken, chicken feet, fermented and salted crabs in their shells, pieces of fried fish, and plump prawns.
While green papaya salads are often eaten with sticky rice, steamed rice or rice noodles, there is a som tam where rice noodles are actually combined into the salad itself.
When it comes to vegetables, you could add shredded cucumber or carrot, shredded apple or round eggplants.
There’s a som tam that is heavier on the snake beans than the green papaya, and another pounded salad that is bean-driven and skips the papaya entirely. The recent Thai corn salad recipe we shared is made as a pounded salad in Bangkok.
For seasoning, try more chillies. Som tam is all about the chillies for some. Shrimp paste, or fermented fish – pla ra in Thailand, padaek in Laos and prahok in Cambodia – are the obvious northern Southeast Asian additions. MSG is also popular.
Garnishes can include fresh fragrant herbs such as coriander, mint and basil, and soft boiled eggs. In a village near Battambang I once saw a papaya salad cook squeeze the famous sweet local oranges into her mortar.
Thai Som Tam Recipe
Equipment
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp palm sugar - or to taste
- 2 tbsp fish sauce
- 2 tbsp lime juice
- 1 tbsp tamarind water
- 3 garlic cloves
- ½ tsp salt
- 2 tbsp roasted peanuts - coarsely crushed
- 2 tbsp dried prawns - soaked, rinsed and drained
- 1 lime - quartered
- 12 cherry tomatoes - halved
- 2 long beans - cut into 2 cm lengths
- 6 bird’s eye chillies - or to taste
- 4 cups green papaya - shredded
To serve
- 2 cups steamed rice
- 2 cups raw vegetables - such as green beans and cabbage leaves
Instructions
- In a small bowl, combine the palm sugar, fish sauce, lime juice, and tamarind water to create a som tum salad dressing. Try it – it should taste all at once sweet, salty and sour – then adjust any of the ingredients to suit your taste, and set aside.
- In a large wooden mortar and pestle, pound the garlic with the salt, then add and pound the peanuts and dried prawns to a coarse paste.
- Add the lime quarters to the mortar, bruising them with the pestle, then add the cherry tomatoes and beans, pound lightly, and push to the side.
- Add the bird’s eye chillies, pound lightly, barely crushing them; the more they’re pounded, the hotter the dish will be, so pound away if you can handle the heat.
- If your mortar is large enough, add the green papaya now, lightly bruise it with the pestle, and with the other hand use a large spoon to turn and toss the salad. Add the dressing you made earlier and combine everything well. It should taste sweet, sour, salty, and spicy-hot.
- If your mortar is not big enough, transfer the first lot of pounded ingredients to a salad bowl, then bruise the papaya in the mortar with the pestle, add the seasoning and combine, then then transfer that to the salad bowl, and combine everything well.
- Serve with steamed rice, raw vegetables such as green beans and cabbage leaves, and sprinkle additional crushed peanuts over the salad.
Nutrition
Click through for more ideas for what to cook this weekend and please do let us know in the Comments below if you make this classic Thai som tam recipe as we’d love to know how it turns out for you, and we’d also love some feedback and a rating.
So many variations I could eat a different style every day for a month … I LIKE papaya but for some reason I much prefer cucumber shredded the same way (sometimes with a carrot) … I like mine funky and spicy :) …. I tried the little crabs and they were well gritty … and for me seemed like a lot of work. I DID pound them a little but was afraid I would end up with crab shards in my som tam … i am confused because all my Lao friends call it thum mak hoong and you used tum som. Is there a difference? I see the “thum/tum” similarity …
Hi Daniel, agree with you there! The difference between green papaya and cucumber is that the young papaya stays firmer longer than cucumber, unless you’re using very young crisp cucumbers. Re the crabs, Southeast Asians love munching into those crunchy shells, but I’m not a fan of the shards either.
In Laos, a ‘tam som’ is a pounded sour salad, and typically a pounded sour fruit salad and any fruit could be used; tomatoes for instance. ‘Tam’, ‘tum’, ‘tom’, ‘dtom’, ‘thom’, ‘thum’ etc refers to both the act of pounding with a pestle in a mortar and a pounded salad. ‘Som’ just means ‘sour’. There are much older written references to the Lao ‘tam som’ than there are the Thai ‘som tam’, so it was the Thais who reversed the words.
In Lao, ‘mak hoong’/’mak hong’ is ‘papaya’ so it specifically refers to a pounded papaya salad, and it’s thought to have come from the Khmer ‘bok la hoong/la hong’, which is a Cambodian pounded salad.
That’s why I like commenting … I get to learn a lot from your answers. I really appreciate it :)
Hi Daniel, always happy to answer your questions :)
Hello Lara: I might come too late for commenting. Very interesting and informative article. I am curious about your following statement: “ In Lao, ‘mak hoong’/’mak hong’ is ‘papaya’ so it specifically refers to a pounded papaya salad, and it’s thought to have come from the Khmer ‘bok la hoong/la hong’, which is a Cambodian pounded salad.” Do you have any reliable sources indicating that the Lao tam mak Hoong originally came from bok lahong. I always have in mind that Mak hoong likely came from Cambodia. But its use to make salad would originate from Lao people a long time ago that used their ancient tradition of making salads from fruits (called tam som) like cucumbers or mangoes to make salad from papayas that they received from Cambodia. Again a great article. Many thanks.
Hi Pat, thanks for the kind words and for taking the time to comment – it’s never too late to comment on anything on our site :) I’ve been researching Cambodia’s culinary history, and, as part of that, the culinary history of neighbouring countries, and the history, pre-history and archaeology of the region since 2011 for an epic cookbook cum culinary history in the vein of David Thompson’s Thai Food. There’s no one particular source for that theory, but rather that’s my view based on my long and extensive research and understanding and thinking. When I can eventually find a publisher for the book it will include a very detailed bibliography with sources :)
One of the biggest problems with this kind of research in this region is that these are predominantly oral cultures, with knowledge passed down through storytelling (and epic storytelling at that!), so there isn’t the kind of documentation of recipes as there was with, say, the Romans, Arabs and Chinese. So it’s a matter of putting together a puzzle and searching for pieces everywhere from etymology and loan words, shipping and trading records, to combing through the research papers of archaeologists, especially archaeobotanists. And there are new discoveries being made in that field all the time as technology improves.
The same salads are made across the region, however, Cambodia has an even longer history of making them than the Laos, as the Khmer (and Mon) are a more ancient people, with archaeological evidence proving that the Neolithic ancestors of the Khmer were in Cambodia and the countries we now know as Thailand and Southern Laos some 6,000 years ago. There’s consensus that the Mon-Khmer were the indigenous peoples to the region, and the Tai and various ethnic groups that comprise the modern-day Laos were settlers, arriving from Southern China much later, mostly in waves between the 8th and 13th centuries.
What’s interesting in the case of Laos is that Phra Chao Fa Ngoum, who, after defeating the Khmer, established the Lao Kingdom of Lan Xang in 1354, had been raised in the Khmer Royal Court, was married to a Khmer princess, and had many Khmer officials and staff in his own royal court at Muong Swa, which became Luang Prabang. Khmer was the language before the Tai-Lao dialects were introduced with the arrival of migrants from China, which explains the Khmer loanwords in Lao, although it’s much closer related to Thai for obvious reasons. Khmer food would have been cooked before the influence of Tai/Lao. As Tai/Lao migrants arrived, new villages and towns were established on Khmer settlements. And of course there was Khmer-Tai-Lao intermarriage and assimilation, as genetic research now shows, which results in hybrid cultures and fusion when it comes to food.
I think many writers who argue that a particular Southeast Asian dish comes from a particular place forget that history, or haven’t bothered to investigate it, and for some reason it’s generally the Thais, Laos and Vietnamese :) It’s quite extraordinary how often Cambodia and the long rich history of the Khmer gets overlooked. And it happens a lot in the diasporas, especially in cookbooks and interviews with chefs and writers. I was recently given a cookbook by a Thai-American writer who writes in the book about the Vietnamese influence along the Mekong in Northeastern Thailand (which is very recent in fact) without a single mention of the fact that the region was Khmer for so long (a CIA report I have says that Thailand’s Northeast was essentially Khmer until the 1970s), there’s still a significant population of Khmer there, and the food she’s writing about is also made in Cambodia. It’s a bizarre phenomenon.
But having said that, in recent years I’ve moved away from this thinking that one specific dish originated from one place and travelled to other places. Food and travel writers love tracing the origin of dishes. Everyone loves playing detective, right?! But in the same way we have dumplings and noodles emerging right across Asia and Europe, and noodles and pasta being made in different places in ancient times, there’s no reason why these particular fruit salads aren’t being pounded by the peoples we now know as Laos in Southern China while the Khmer and Mon are pounding them in Southeast Asia :)
Hello Lara,
Your knowledge of the Laos-Cambodia relationship history is quite impressive. Yes, the influences of Khmer civilization on the cultures of Lanxang kingdom through our great king Fah Nguum have been taught in all Lao schools. There were cultural exchanges going on for centuries between the two kingdoms. Papayas (Mak Hoong in Lao) and some other ingredients for making papaya salad (Tum Mak Hoong or pounded papaya) likely were brought to landlocked Laos initially from Cambodia and the papaya’s names are closely similar [in Lao (Mak Hoong), in Khmer (L’hung) and in Khmer ethnic minorities living in provinces bordering the Southeastern part of Laos (Lohong, Rohong)]. For many years, I have been very interested in discovering possible origins of the word Tum Som, that now has been used interchangeably with the word Tum Mak Hoong. According to some Lao elders, including my own late grandfather, Tum Som originated from an old Lao tradition of preparing food from unripe fruits for consumption. Our ancestors, who were mostly peasants, ate ripe fruits, like mangoes and tamarinds, with steam-cooked sticky rice, while unripe forms of these fruits were also consumed with an old Lao dipping sauce called Jeow. The Jeow were made by pounding chilli peppers, garlic or scallion and Padaek together using a mortar and pestle. Green mangoes were peeled, sliced, dipped into the Jeow (called Jeow Mak Muang) and eaten usually as snacks. This tradition still exists until in Laos today mostly in villages. Alternately, it was thought that mango slices were directly pounded together with the Jeow and the mix was called Tum Som (pounded sour) as unripe mangoes, or tamarinds, provided a sour flavor. This same tradition was subsequently applied to other unripe fruits available, like cucumbers, green bananas and green papayas, although lime juice was also added to give a delightful sour flavor that these unripe fruits initially lacked. Gradually, it was believed that the name Tum Som became synonymous with Tum Som made with papaya (Tum Mak Hoong) as the latter became the most popular variation of any Tum Som made with unripe fruits. When Tum Som was made with other fruits, the fruit name must be specified, like Tum Mak Muang (with mangoes), Tam Mak Taeng (with cucumbers) etc.. It is not known for sure when papayas first reached Lao territory, although papayas, chili peppers and all other ingredients for making Tum Mak Hoong, like garlic, lime, tomatoes, Padaek, palm sugar and others were cultivated and/or used in Lao cuisine at least since the 1800s, according to articles written by early Europeans who visited Laos. However, until these days, I still have not found any written documentation that supports these old stories about Tum Som’ origins. This is just what I have in mind. Keep up the good work. Thanks.
Hello again Pat, so you’re Lao? I didn’t realise from the name, sorry :) Are you in Luang Prabang? We’ve been meaning to get back for ages. If it wasn’t for the pandemic, it would have been years ago. It’s one of my favourite places in the world.
Thank you so much for sharing all that. Greatly appreciate it. I’m so pleased to hear that the Khmer history is shared in schools there, because, sadly, in Thailand, it’s not. They don’t acknowledge the Khmer history at all and have a very strange, distorted view – and I know that because of my Thai friends who have visited us in Cambodia and have been shocked to learn of the Khmer history of Angkor LOL. But I know that Khmer and Laos have a very different relationship to Khmer and Thais — thank, Buddha! ;) — so that’s great :)
My husband Terence and I have travelled to Laos and absolutely loved the food, especially the wonderful jeow family :) They do eat very similar dipping sauces/dips/relishes etc in Cambodia, as well as the the unripe fruit salads, and there are a huge variety. But I don’t think Khmer people hold the dips/relishes in such high regard as Laos do their many jeow. They’re made the same way, in the mortar and pestle — almost everything is made in a mortar and pestle; for me, it’s the soundtrack of early morning in Siem Reap and I miss it so much (I’m still in Australia taking care of my Mum, while Terence is in Cambodia with our cat Pepper). But, still, I think they’re just one element of a meal and not as essential as the jeow is to culinary culture in Laos.
Finding written documentation is really hard, because of the predominance of oral traditions. So, yes, seeing what foreign travellers have written in their travel journals is a really good source. I do this a lot. But it’s also important to trust oral storytelling and tales passed down by elders from ancestors. These should also be respected and considered just as legitimate as a written source.
When I can eventually find a publisher for my Cambodia book and it’s ‘out there’, I will definitely share more resources with you :) Would love to meet up when we can get back to Laos. In the meantime, please do visit us here from time to time. I would also LOVE to know if you’re in Luang Prabang, as I am dying to know if our favourite Lao Khao Soi noodle shop is still there!! :)
Hello again Lara:
Yes, you are right, Laos is my birth place. But I now live in the US and I am currently visiting relatives in Vientiane and surrounding regions for a few weeks. I just came back from a week visit to Chongqing, a city/agglomeration of 30 millions people located in the Southwestern part of China. What a huge difference, compared with Laos! I have not yet been to Luang Prabang (also one of my favorite towns). But I have been told it is currently packed with tourists from around the world, just like Vangvieng, likely because of the new Lao-Chine train route.
My interest in Southeast Asian cuisines began when I came to the US years ago, where Asian cuisines, in particulars Thai and Vietnamese, became very popular, while Lao (and also Cambodian) foods were virtually unknown. Even today, most Lao people prefer to open their restaurants under the label Thai-Lao/Lao-Thai restaurants. And many people believe that Lao food is basically the same as or just a strange version of Thai food. But I know that Lao cuisine remains unique, in spite of strong influences from neighboring countries.
I can’t wait to see your Cambodian cookbook finally published. I was introduced to Cambodian food through Cambodian colleagues when I lived in Boston, MA, and I would like to learn more about Khmer cuisine and its long history. I hope we can meet one day during one of my yearly visits to Laos. In the meantime, have a wonderful day in Australia. All the best.
Hi Pat, just quickly for now: please make sure you also get to Luang Prabang. It doesn’t matter that it’s crowded this time of year. It’s nowhere near as crowded as places in Thailand and Vietnam, only crowded compared to Vientiane. But it’s absolutely beautiful and a very special place, one of my favourite places in Southeast Asia, especially in the evening, sitting by the riverside with a chilled beer Lao. Please don’t miss it. See my posts here: https://grantourismotravels.com/destinations/asia/laos/luang-prabang/
I’ll respond properly to the rest of your comment when I have time. Enjoy!