Spice up your weekday with this Thai beef salad

The tastiest salad you’ll ever eat, a Thai beef salad is a thing of beauty, too. It’s spicy, hot, crunchy and cool, with perfectly cooked slices of steak running through it.

Thai Beef Salad

Serves 3

Ingredients
1 tsp rapeseed oil
2 x 225g rump steaks
finely grated zest and juice of 1 lime
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp light or dark soft brown sugar
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 garlic clove, crushed
100g cherry tomatoes, halved
½ cucumber, cut in half lengthways, then thickly sliced
1 courgette, thinly sliced
small bunch of coriander, roughly chopped
small bunch of mint, leaves picked and roughly chopped
small bunch of basil, leaves picked and roughly chopped

To finish
45g roasted unsalted peanuts, lightly crushed
1-2 red chillies, deseeded (or not, if you prefer more heat) and finely sliced (optional)

Method
Heat a griddle pan until hot. Rub the rapeseed oil over the steaks, then place them in the hot griddle pan and cook over a high heat for 2 minutes on each side until browned – as the steaks cook, you will see them cooking from the side and the colour will change along the edge of each steak as it cooks through. You want it to have changed colour about halfway up before turning it over. Transfer the cooked steaks to a plate.

Whisk the lime zest and juice, soy sauce, sugar, fish sauce and garlic together in a small bowl. Pour over the hot steaks and leave to rest/marinate for about 5 minutes, while you prepare the remaining ingredients. Once prepped, tip all the remaining salad ingredients into a salad bowl.

Slice the steaks and add to the salad bowl, drizzling any marinade over the top, then toss the whole lot together.

Divide the beef salad among three plates and sprinkle over the crushed peanuts and sliced chillies (for those that like it hot!) to finish.

Extracted from Eat Well for Less by Jo Scarratt-Jones (BBC Books, approx €17). Photography by Andrew Burton.