One of my favorite salads is a green mango or green papaya salad (although I have to give green mangoes the edge). You usually see the dish on Vietnamese or Thai menus. I'd never really thought of making it at home until I saw a pile of green papayas at the store the other day. Well, why not?
Plenty of reasons, as it turned out. Green papayas are big. Like the size of butternut squash. And they get sort of wet and slimy. Peeling one is not an easy task. And trying to cut a large papaya into long strips, as required for a salad, is hard. Green papayas can't be easily managed with a knife. I ended up using my Japanese slicer, getting the papayas into the thinnest slices possible before hand cutting the strips. It took more than half an hour.
An easier way, if you're a master, is to chop it up with a knife while holding it in one hand. I posted a video of that technique below. Really an amazing thing to behold.
I didn't use the recipe posted on the video; I used a really delicious recipe I found at The Passionate Eater.
So what does green papayas taste like? When a friend asked me this, I wasn't sure what to say. Green papayas are basically unripened papayas, so they only have the vaguest papaya taste and are much more chewier. I wouldn't eat it plain, but somehow in a salad with a very fragrant and pungent dressing, they became addictive. The Passionate Eater describes the salad as a kind of slaw, and it definitely is a dish in which the sum transcends the parts.
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