Starters
Salad of Lamb and Peanuts with Lime
Pink slices of seared lamb neck fillet tossed with a hot-sour lime and fish sauce dressing, cucumber, herbs and crunchy peanuts.
- Serves 4
- Prep 20 min
- Cook 10 min (plus resting)
- Modern
Method
Take the lamb out of the fridge 20 minutes before cooking. Rub with the oil and season with salt and pepper.
Heat a heavy frying pan or griddle until very hot. Cook the lamb for 3–4 minutes a side, turning to brown all over, until it feels springy for medium-rare (about 55 °C in the middle). Rest on a board for 10 minutes.
Whisk together the lime juice, fish sauce, sugar, chilli and garlic until the sugar dissolves. Taste: it should be sour, salty, sweet and hot in roughly equal measure.
Slice the lamb thinly across the grain and toss it, with any resting juices, in half the dressing.
Toss the cucumber, shallots, spring onions, mint and coriander with the rest of the dressing. Pile on to four plates, top with the lamb and scatter with the peanuts.
Tip: tap a step to tick it off as you cook.
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Chef’s notes
- Lamb neck fillet is tender, well marbled and good value; lamb loin or rump steaks also work.
- Dress the salad at the last moment so the herbs stay crisp.
How this recipe was developed
The old Cookeryonline page closely followed a recipe from Peter Gordon’s The Sugar Club Cookbook (1997), so we wrote a new version. We rebuilt it using the technique of the best-rated Thai beef salad we found, with lamb in place of beef.
- Rest, slice, dress the meat first. RecipeTin Eats’ Thai beef salad (4.98/5 from 163 votes) rests the seared meat, slices it thinly and tosses it in the dressing before adding the salad.
- Balanced dressing. Lime juice, fish sauce, sugar, chilli and garlic tasted for sour, salty, sweet and hot follows the same recipe.
- Lamb neck fillet. Our choice: well-marbled neck fillet stays juicy when seared and served pink.
Sources we compared (ratings as shown on each site on 31 October 2026):
- RecipeTin Eats (Nagi Maehashi): Thai beef salad (4.98/5 from 163 ratings)
- Peter Gordon: The Sugar Club Cookbook (1997): an earlier Cookeryonline version closely followed a recipe in this book
This is an original Cookeryonline recipe written in our own words. Ingredient choices and techniques are credited above; no source text has been copied.