Squid Salad (Yam Pla Muek)

Ingredients

Equipment Needed

• •Large pot for blanching
• •Slotted spoon or spider strainer
• •Large mixing bowl

Instructions

1. 1

   Score and prep the squid

   Lay each squid body flat on the cutting board, inner side up. Score a crosshatch pattern with your knife, cutting about halfway through the flesh. The cuts should be about 5mm apart. Don't cut all the way through. Then cut the scored body into pieces roughly two fingers wide. Leave the tentacles whole or halve them if large. The scoring is the whole move here. When the squid hits boiling water, each piece curls into a tight tube with ridged edges that grip the dressing. Without scoring, you get flat, slippery sheets that the lime slides right off.

   Buy whole squid and clean it yourself if you can. Pre-cleaned squid from a supermarket works, but the texture is often softer from sitting in liquid. Fresh squid is firm, slightly translucent, and smells like the ocean, not like fish.
2. 2

   Build the yam dressing

   In a bowl large enough to hold everything, combine the lime juice, fish sauce, and palm sugar. Stir until the sugar dissolves completely. Add the sliced chilies. Taste. Sour should hit first, then salty, then a gentle sweetness rounding the back, then heat building. If the lime is too sharp, add a pinch more sugar. If it tastes flat, more fish sauce. This is the four pillars in a spoon. Get it right before the squid goes in. You can't fix the dressing once it's on the protein.

   Palm sugar, not granulated white sugar. Palm sugar has a caramel complexity that rounds out lime juice without making the dressing taste sweet. Granulated sugar just adds flat sweetness. The difference is real.
3. 3

   Blanch the squid

   Bring a pot of water to a hard boil. No salt. Drop the squid pieces and tentacles in. Watch them. The moment the scored pieces curl up and turn white, about 30 to 45 seconds, pull them out with a slotted spoon or spider. Do not wait a second longer. Squid goes from tender to rubber in the time it takes you to look at your phone. Drain briefly on a plate. Do not rinse with cold water. You want the squid warm.

   Ajarn always said there are two ways to cook squid: under a minute or over thirty minutes. Anything in between gives you erasers. For yam, you want the fast method. In and out.
4. 4

   Dress while warm

   Immediately add the warm squid to the bowl of dressing. Toss it through. The residual heat from the squid does the real work here. Warm protein absorbs dressing. Cold protein repels it. You'll see the lime juice and fish sauce getting pulled into the scored ridges. This is the technique that separates a proper yam from a dressed salad. Let it sit for one minute in the dressing, tossing once or twice.

5. 5

   Add herbs and aromatics

   Add the sliced shallots, white onion, Chinese celery pieces and leaves, lemongrass, mint, and cilantro. Toss everything together with your hands or two spoons. The herbs should be distributed throughout, not sitting on top. Taste one piece of squid with a bit of everything. Adjust: more lime if it needs brightness, more fish sauce if the salt is shy, another chili if you want more heat. Transfer to a plate. Serve at room temperature with lime wedges on the side. Do not refrigerate this. Cold kills the dressing.

Chef Tips

• •The scoring technique is non-negotiable. A crosshatch pattern cut halfway into the squid body does two things: it creates surface area for the dressing to grip, and it causes the squid to curl into beautiful ridged tubes when blanched. Without it, you're eating flat squid in a puddle of dressing. That's not yam.
• •Chinese celery (khuen chai) is not Western celery. It's thinner, more pungent, with an almost herbaceous bitterness. If you can't find it, use the inner pale-green stalks and leaves from a head of Western celery. They're closer in flavor than the thick outer ribs. Every seafood yam in Bangkok uses Chinese celery. It belongs here.
• •The yam dressing formula governs every variation in this category: yam wun sen, yam talay, yam goong. Learn this ratio once and you can dress anything the four pillars touch. Sour leads. Salt follows. Sweet rounds. Heat builds. Principles, not recipes.
• •Serve yam at room temperature. Always. Fridge-cold yam deadens the lime, mutes the fish sauce, and makes the herbs taste like nothing. If you've ever had yam that tasted flat, temperature was probably the problem. This is food designed for a tropical climate. It lives at 30 degrees Celsius.

Advance Preparation

• •Squid can be cleaned, scored, and cut up to a few hours ahead. Keep it refrigerated on a plate, covered.
• •The dressing can be mixed 30 minutes ahead and left at room temperature. The lime stays bright for about an hour. After that, it starts to dull.
• •Do not assemble the full yam in advance. The herbs wilt, the shallots lose their bite, and the squid toughens in the acid. Blanch, dress, toss, serve. That's the order, and it happens in real time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Nutrition Information

1 serving (about 270g)