How to Make Larb Gai – Lahb Gai – Laab Gai – Larp Gai – Laap Gai – Lahb Gai ลาบไก่
Prep time
Cook time
Total time
Author: SheSimmers.com
Recipe type: Main Course Salad
Serves: 2
Ingredients
- 1 pound (~500g) ground chicken
- ½ cup (3 fluid ounces) water, if necessary (see instructions)
- 2 large (56g) shallots, peeled and finely sliced lengthwise
- 1 tablespoon store-bought or homemade toasted rice powder (see notes)
- Fish sauce, or to taste
- Lime juice, or to taste
- Ground dried red pepper, to taste
- ½ cup (4g) whole cilantro leaves or coarsely-chopped sawtooth coriander leaves
- ⅓ cup (8g) mint leaves
Instructions
- In a skillet over medium heat, saute the chicken until cooked through. (Don’t use high heat; you don’t want to brown the chicken.) There should be some juice in the pan. If it gets too dry, add some water to the pan up to ½ cup.
- Once the chicken is done, take the pan off the heat and immediately add the shallots; toss to wilt the shallots.
- Start out by adding 1 tablespoon of fish sauce and 1 tablespoon of lime juice. Toss everything together well, and taste to see if you like how it tastes. If not, add more fish sauce and/or lime juice until the salad tastes right to you. (For this recipe, I use 2 tablespoons of fish sauce and 4 tablespoons of lime juice.)
- Add the toasted rice powder; toss.
- Add about one teaspoon of dried chilli powder to the mix and taste. I usually add 1 tablespoon, but that may be too much for some of you.
- Once the taste is where you want your laab to be, mix in the mint leaves and cilantro or culantro. Serve.
Notes
See this post on how to make your own toasted rice powder (khao khua): http://shesimmers.com/2009/04/khao-kua-how-to-make-toasted-rice.html
1 If anyone has been to Thailand recently, you’re probably aware of the name of our international airportSuvarnabhumi. This is an example of an etymology-based transliteration. Had the name been transliterated to reflect the vernacular pronunciation, it would have looked entirely different. Just by looking at the spelling, can you even tell that the name is to be properly pronounced, su-wan (rhymes with “sun”)-na-poom? No literate, sane Thai will ever go around calling the airport Soo-var-na-bhoo-mee. Would you be a little confused to find out that the name of our former prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, is properly pronounced, A-pi-sit Wait-cha-chee-wa? It may seem misleading, but you can see the etymology-oriented philosophy behind such a transliteration. The name of another former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra (pronounced Tak-sin Chin-na-wat), on the other hand, is a confused hybrid of both etymology-oriented and vernacular-oriented philosophies. It’s both and, yet, it’s neither. I’m sure it works for him.
2 The Thai people have an informal way of employing the English letter R to indicate the lengthening of vowels. Each short vowel in the Thai language has its long counterpart; everything comes in pair. So in order to indicate that the vowel in the word ลาบ is a long A as in “fAther,” an R is added to signify the lengthening of the vowel. Though utterly without any linguistic basis, it is a very prevalent practice — so prevalent that it has more or less become the standard.
By introducing an extra consonant, i.e. the R, into the mix, it is bound to lead people, especially Americans, to pronounce the word with the rolling R just as they do the word, “garb” when there is no R represented anywhere in the original be it in the spelling or the pronunciation. And this is primarily the reason I don’t like the use of the English R as the marker of long vowels; it brings into the mix an extra consonantal element where there is none. Would a classicist ever dream of using the R to differentiate the English transliterations of the omicron (Ο – short o) from that of the omega (Ω – long o)? Never.
