This Thai meat salad shines with bright and bold flavours. It comes together quickly and requires minimal preparation. It also scales up easily for meal prep.

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Time: 3/5
Half the time was spent getting ready to cook.

Effort: 2/5
There’s no prepping to do with ground pork, and you don’t even have to brown the meat!

Moo meat, Moo problems

The words “Meat salad” feels diametrically opposed. It doesn’t seem to be a concept in Western cuisine, but there’s a whole category of Thai food which is exactly that.

Moo is the Thai word for pork (but that doesn’t mean that Oink is for beef!). So Laab Moo is a Laab salad made with ground pork. Like other recipes based on ground pork like Pad Krapao Moo or Pork and String Beans and Preserved Mustard Greens, it’s quick to make because there is very minimal prep involved. There’s a lot of surface area to hold on to flavour, so there isn’t much benefit to marinating.

All the usual suspects are at play here in creating a distinctive Thai flavour: fish sauce, lime juice, plenty of garlic and shallots, and culantro. But what makes Laab Moo stand apart is the use of toasted glutinous rice powder, or Khao Khua. Besides imparting a toasty nutty taste, it also acts like the corn starch in a slurry to thicken the sauce (dressing?) and help the flavours cling onto the meat.

It’s easy for me to just buy it from the Thai grocer, but not hard to make it yourself either. Just get some glutinous rice and toast it lightly in a dry pan, then whizz it up in a food processor. Any leftover glutinous rice can be made into savoury Chinese rice dumplings called Jung (or Zongzi). Or rather, the other way round – make Jung, then turn any leftover glutinous rice into Khau Khua.

The way I learned to eat Laab Moo is as the filling for lettuce wraps, which is an excellent low carb and lower calorie way to get in your protein. But raw lettuce leaves don’t translate well to meal prep, so I rather unconventionally served this batch with rice instead. It still works super well, because it’s essentially an umami meat sauce with a sharp acidic tang that is enhanced with punchy aromatics. It’s a similar concept to the Bolog Bowls where I serve bolognese over rice.

This was one of the easiest meal preps I have done in a good long while. Because the meat doesn’t need any prep and doesn’t need to be browned in batches, scaling up a batch of Laab Moo is as simple as adding more meat to the pan. The same pan can then be used as the mixing bowl as well, so it’s super easy doing the dishes afterwards too.

All in all, it’s a low effort, high reward meal prep recipe that I hope you try out. Make a big batch, enjoy some lettuce wraps, then have it with rice throughout the week.

Posts since the last recipe that was actually served with rice: 0

Dramatis Personae

Served 7.

• 1200g ground pork
• 4 large shallots
• A few cloves of garlic
• 4 large limes
• 3 tbsp toasted glutinous rice powder (khau khua)
• A few sprigs of culantro, or cilantro
• 6 tbsp fish sauce
• 1 tsp fresh or dried chilis, finely minced

Also served with about 1kg of green beans. Always eat your veggies!

Executive summary

1. Make rice. Mince shallots, garlic, and culantro. Wash and cut green beans.
2. Stir fry green beans and season lightly, then reserve.
3. Add pork to pan on medium-low heat. Stir occasionally, until no longer pink.
4. Add the rest of the ingredients, and squeeze in the lime juice.
5. Mix to combine, taste, and adjust seasoning.
6. Combine and serve.

Play by Play

Last things first. I got all the knife work out of the way right at the beginning.

I want to use the same pan for both the vegetables and the meat, but I want the veggies to go first so they have a more neutral, clean flavour. A brief stir fry is all it needs to get the green beans where I want them to be.

The Laab Moo itself is super easy. Just cook pork until it’s no longer pink – no need to brown it at all – then mix in everything else.

Make sure to taste it and season it until you like it. Mine needed a lot more lime juice!

And we’re done! Laab Moo is good warm, it is good at room temperature, and it is also good cold. A very versatile dish.

Lettuce wraps is the traditional way to serve Laab Moo, but rice is much more meal prep friendly.

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