This salad looks like a picture of Spring.
It’s as tasty as it is beautiful to look at. And healthy too! It gives you half your daily 
servings of fruits and vegetables, the tomato being the fruit. It’s also low in both calories and fat. It’s quick and easy. Good grief, never mind cooking it, we should canonize it! The Thai Flavors in this dish really do combine the sweet and salty, the sour, and the spicy—the four essentials of Thai cooking. With each bite, you experience them in combination and individually. The lettuce is very important to this dish and not just for that glorious bed of color that frames everything you put on it. It’s fundamental to the recipe’s success.
The lettuce is grown in Brooklyn, believe it or not.
When I buy Bibb or Boston lettuce, I buy the hydroponically grown variety. At Whole Foods, it comes from Brooklyn. Gotham Greens is a greenhouse built on the roof of the Whole Foods flagship Greenpoint. It’s a huge success. They’ve gone on to build 8 more rooftop greenhouses, three in New York City alone. The largest one of all is in Chicago. It’s a whopping 75,000 square feet. The quality of the lettuce is superb. At Whole Foods, it’s $2.49. That may be a little more expensive than a standard head of Bibb. But I find I throw half of the latter out. The leaves are bruised. The lettuce is minute. Gotham Greens lets me tear off leaves one at a time and leave the rest in the fridge for days on end. It stays in perfect shape. Now if only they could eliminate the plastic clamshell…
How to Home “Dry Age” your own steak for this and any other dish.
What dry-aging does is concentrate the fat, increasingly the meaty flavor as the meat dries. It also breaks down muscle proteins so you get a dense, more tender texture. What commercial dry-aging also does is add hefty sums of money to the cost of steak. In a Cook’s Illustrated “Notes from Readers” section, there was a question asked about dry-aging steak at home. The Cook’s Illustrated people replicated commercial dry-aging in a home refrigerator.
The home Dry Aging Process is very easy.
You wrap a rib eye or, in this case, a New York Strip steak in layers of cheesecloth and put the meat on a wire rack in the coldest 
part of your refrigerator (generally at the back). Four days later you have something that looks quite awful– like an accident victim. But when you cook this meat, you have something that approximates the flavor you might have paid double for. It’s worth a try. As to how to cook it, we urge you to read our post “Forget Everything You Know About Cooking a Great Steak”. Click on this link to do so: https://chewingthefat.us.com/2020/04/forget-everything-you-know-about-cooking-a-great-steak.html Here’s the recipe and after it some other great takes on steak.
Thai Steak Salad with Fresh Herbs and Ginger Lime Dressing
The Thai Flavors in this dish really do combine the sweet and salty, the sour and the spicy—the four essentials of Thai cooking.
Ingredients
- For the Steak:
- 2 tbsp soy sauce
- 2 tsp. fish sauce
- 2 tsp. sugar
- 1 12 ounce New York Strip Steak
- 1 head of Bibb or Boston Lettuce
- 1 cucumber peeled, seeded, and sliced ¼ inch thick
- 1 cup of Grape or Cherry tomatoes, halved.
- 2 carrots, shaved with a vegetable peeler
- ¼ cup Fresh Mint Leaves
- 1/4 cup Fresh Basil Leaves
- For the Ginger Lime Dressing:
- 2 tsp. Fish Sauce
- 2 tsp. Sesame Oil
- 2 tsp. Sugar
- 1 tbsp.Fresh Ginger, peeled and minced
- 1 small Jalapeno Pepper, minced
- 2 tbsp. Fresh Lime Juice
Directions
- Step 1 In a glass loaf pan, combine the soy sauce, fish sauce, and sugar. Add the steak, turning to coat it on all sides. Marinate it for 15 minutes at room temperature. (Or you can leave it overnight in the refrigerator.)
- Step 2 Prepare the vegetables as the steak marinates.
- Step 3 Prepare the Ginger Lime Dressing
- Step 4 In a bowl, stir together 2 teaspoons each of fish sauce, toasted sesame oil and sugar, 1 tablespoon minced, peeled fresh ginger, 1 small minced jalapeno, and 2 tablespoons of lime juice.
- Step 5 To cook the steak:
- Step 6 Cook in a non-stick pan—not a cast-iron skillet or a stainless steel pan. The non-stick surface prevents the steaks from sticking without oil. 2. Don’t add any oil. That oil is what smokes and splatters at high temperatures. The two cuts we mentioned, New York Strip and Rib Eye are well-marbled and don’t need extra fat to brown them. They’ll release plenty of their own while cooking. 3. Do not pre-heat the skillet. What starting the steak ‘cold’ allows the interior to heat up gradually and evenly. 4. Start with high heat to drive off the moisture then lower it so that the interior and exterior finish cooking at the same time. 5. Flip the steak every 2 minutes. It will cook from the bottom up and the top down so the interior will be even all the way through and the crust will gradually build up.
- Step 7 Transfer the steak to a cutting board, let rest 5 minutes, then thinly slice against the grain.
- Step 8 While the steak rests, in a large bowl, toss together the cucumber, tomatoes, carrots, and mint.
- Step 9 Add the dressing and toss to combine.
- Step 10 Cover plates with Bibb lettuce leaves. Arrange salad and slices of beef atop. Serve at once.
- Step 11
