A fun weeknight meal ready to eat in 30 minutes, the whole family will love digging into these quick and easy chicken larb lettuce wraps.
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Stir the lime juice, fish sauce and sugar in a small bowl or jug until sugar dissolves. Set aside.
Heat a wok over medium-low heat. Add rice and cook, stirring and tossing for about 4-5 mins or until golden brown. Cool completely. Grind with a pestle and mortar or in a spice grinder to form a coarse powder.
Heat oil in the same wok over medium heat. Add chicken, garlic, chilli and lemongrass. Cook, stirring and breaking up chicken, for about 5 mins or until lightly browned and cooked through.
Transfer to a bowl and stir in half the ground rice. Stir in lime juice mixture. Then stir in bean sprouts, mint and basil leaves.
Serve chicken mixture with red onion, lettuce leaves and lime wedges. Garnish with extra basil and mint leaves.
Larb is a meat salad consisting of a minced protein, which sits on a bed of fresh mint, basil, lemongrass, onion and chilli. The cooked and fresh elements of the salad are harmoniously tied together with a savoury-sweet dressing made of fish sauce, lime juice and sugar. To top it all off, roasted ground rice powder is sprinkled generously over the top of the salad. It’s no wonder that larb is the national dish of Laos. You may be wondering, if it’s a Laotian dish, why are chicken lettuce wraps on almost every Thai restaurant menu in Australia? This is because Thailand has its own version of larb, thanks to the Laotians who brought their beloved dish with them when they migrated to other countries.
Here are some tips when roasting the rice for your chicken larb gai:
Because larb gai in Thailand also includes dried chillies, the final dish can be very spicy. For this reason, people don’t usually eat this salad on its own. Larb is often a dish that a family might share at the dinner table, scooped onto individual plates of sticky rice or regular rice. Other cooling sides are served alongside this typically fiery dish, such as crisp lettuce and long beans.
Follow this recipe and treat your family and friends to this delicious dish that symbolises luck and prosperity. Love Asian flavours and have mastered how to make chicken lettuce wraps? Check out these ideas that use chicken mince, such as Sichuan-style noodle soup with chicken mince, chilli naan breads with chicken and Vietnamese spicy pork noodle bowl. Wondering how else you can use chicken mince? Try these recipes for chicken nachos, chicken parmigiana rissoles and chicken and two-grain stuffed capsicums.