Kris Yenbamroong is the owner of Night + Market and Night + Market Song in Los Angeles, whose cookbook is out this month, woo hoo! If you're having a severe Thai food deficit in your life, you need this book. So that's all of us. In the excerpt + recipe below, Kris waxes poetic about his love for larb.
Larb (noun, verb) / laap / : a spicy minced meat salad meant to be eaten with your hands along with herbs, sticky rice, and various vegetables.
A year or so ago, I was in Isaan, Thailand hanging out at a house owned by the sister of my friend Ah Pong. I met Ah Pong several years ago because he worked under my uncle Vilas (who was a general) as a sergeant in the Thai army. He is from Udon Thani, the largest city in Isaan, and his real name is Pongkham, but I call him Ah Pong—ah being a way of calling someone uncle when they’re not necessarily related to you.
Occasionally we’d take trips to Isaan together. On one of those trips, I ended up talking to Ah Pong’s sister’s husband about larb, and somehow the subject of turkey larb came up—a dish that I had heard about but had never tried before. Oh, let’s make some right now, came the immediate response from the husband. So we crowded into a pickup truck, drove out to the boonies at dusk, and hiked to a mosquito-infested “ranch” run by a former high school teacher who had gotten into the turkey-raising business after retirement. He told us the turkeys were too scrawny to sell—they had some fattening up to do before the end of summer—but after some coaxing he sold us the largest bird of the flock, which weighed in around 12 pounds.
So after bagging that turkey inside an old rice sack, we hauled it home and got to work on the larb. Someone sliced the turkey’s throat while I held it by the legs upside down, the blood sputtering into a metal bowl as it drained from its body. As someone who had never slaughtered a live animal before, it was borderline traumatizing to feel an animal fight for its life (I could see the imprint of its feet in my hands afterward). And I realize I say this as a chef who serves and consumes a lot of meat, but it’s not the best feeling to kill an animal. There’s a certain mixture of apprehension and adrenaline that hits right before as you realize you’re going to be eating that same bird in a short span of time. After doing it once, I’m good on slaughtering for a while.
We plucked the feathers, butchered the bird into fat cuts of pale pink meat, then took turns chopping the meat on a wide tree stump until it became a fine turkey mince. The whole ordeal took two to three hours, lubricated by copious amounts of icy beer and pork rinds. Making larb from scratch can be an intensive process, but it’s also a communal thing, like a clambake or a tri-tip barbecue. When you butcher a whole animal for larb, everyone pitches in to prepare some element. One person is making stock from the bones, another person is straining and cleaning the blood, and someone else is frying up the skin to make cracklings to crumble on top. Somebody takes their turn on meat mincing duty (thwack! thwack!) while the little kids are in the corner chopping up fresh herbs. There’s a remarkable efficiency to the whole thing. And of course there are the older guests on the sidelines nursing beers, watching and occasionally acting as sort of cheerleaders while the larb takes shape. By the time you’re actually ready to eat, you realize that the social context in which you’re making it matters as much as the food itself.
