Recipe for Thai green papaya salad or som tam. Refreshing and invigorating, it shakes your very being with its intensely powerful combination of hot, sour, salty, savoury and sweet flavours, epitomising Thai cuisine and indeed the foods of some of its immediate neighbours
Follow with the dried shrimp, pounding it down to break it up a little.
Next, add the chilli and green beans, pounding to bruise and to break up the chilli for heat.
Add the tomatoes, crush lightly with the pestle, just to extract a little juice, we don't want them mushy.
Finally, add the green papaya, half tbsp fish sauce, the palm sugar and the lime juice. Mix it all up with a spoon and taste. Add more fish sauce if you'd like it saltier and more palm sugar if you think it needs it.
Top with the peanuts and mint or Thai basil and enjoy immediately.