This authentic larb recipe is for you if you can’t stomach the thought of eating liver. It will make you a larb Thai food lover. It’s seriously the only way I can really enjoy eating liver. This larb Thai recipe for me is one of the most special recipes we have on this site.
Make sure you eat this one while it’s still hot!
If you can eat liver, but the pasty after-texture that sticks in your mouth ends up making you gag, then this Thai larb recipe is for you. The way the liver is cooked creates a perfect texture for this dish. I’m not a big fan of liver, but this larb recipe helps me really enjoy it.
It’s good to have a palatable liver recipe for those who really don’t like it. Liver packs so many nutrients that once you learn why you should have this superfood in your diet, you too will seek out ways to do just that. This recipe’s a good one to have for that reason.
Table Of Contents:
Larb Liver Recipe.. What’s Larb?
First of all, it is not pronounced, laRb. It’s pronounced Laab or laaahb. The letter “r” is completely silent.
Larb Thai is a simple recipe that uses a traditional Thai chili flakes, fish sauce, fresh herbs and either meat or liver. The most common one is minced pork. It’s also called a Thai Larb Salad or just “larb salad.”
Pork Larb Salad Recipe Ingredients
The only ingredient not pictured are the 15 grams of organic palm sugar, about the size of a ping-pong ball. The organic palm sugar can be replaced by a stevia tea we make by brewing fresh stevia leaves (I’ll show you how). Replacing the organic palm sugar with stevia tea makes this larb liver recipe even more low carb.
If you’re not going to use a stevia tea alternative, organic palm sugar is the way to go. It’s the lowest on the GI scale of all natural sugars. And it adds to the grainy texture an authentic Thai laab should have. Just like many of our other Thai recipes, this larb salad recipe is easy and fast to make.
The hardest it gets is slicing the raw pork liver.
Step 1. Slice the liver
Actually, don’t dice it.
You can dice the liver if you want.
We always just slice it like this for this larb recipe:
Step 2. Chop the vegetables
Before you start chopping,
Get the water boiling and a bowl ready for the sauce creation.
Step 3. Mix the larb recipe sauce ingredients together
When you squeeze the limes, try to leave the seeds out. Seeds will contain the most lectins, something best to avoid if you can. To learn more about lectins, I highly suggest picking this book up, The Plant Paradox by Dr. Steven R. Gundry.
Not to sidetrack this recipe post, but here’s a quick review of this book.
I still consume lectins, they’re unavoidable, but this book changed how I eat and how I cook in many ways.
Here’s an excerpt from his book listing page:
Most of us have heard of gluten—a protein found in wheat that causes widespread inflammation in the body. Americans spend billions of dollars on gluten-free diets in an effort to protect their health. But what if we’ve been missing the root of the problem? In The Plant Paradox, renowned cardiologist Dr. Steven Gundry reveals that gluten is just one variety of a common, and highly toxic, plant-based protein called lectin. Lectins are found not only in grains like wheat but also in the “gluten-free” foods most of us commonly regard as healthy, including many fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and conventional dairy products. These proteins, which are found in the seeds, grains, skins, rinds, and leaves of plants, are designed by nature to protect them from predators (including humans). Once ingested, they incite a kind of chemical warfare in our bodies, causing inflammatory reactions that can lead to weight gain and serious health conditions.
At his waitlist-only clinics in California, Dr. Gundry has successfully treated tens of thousands of patients suffering from autoimmune disorders, diabetes, leaky gut syndrome, heart disease, and neurodegenerative diseases with a protocol that detoxes the cells, repairs the gut, and nourishes the body. Now, in The Plant Paradox, he shares this clinically proven program with readers around the world.
Back to the larb Thai recipe.. this is what the sauce looks like before mixing in the freshly blanched, steaming pork liver. After the liver is mixed in, the veggies are added and you’re done. It’s that easy.
Step 4. Blanch the pork liver
After the water is boiling, let it sit for 30 seconds before plopping the liver in for 45 seconds. After about a minute, strain.
Step 5. Liver Larb Recipe is best served HOT
You want to let it cool just a bit and then eat it before it cools down. So make the sauce before you blanche, then mix it all together fast. If you love liver and can eat it hot or cold, then have at it.. for me, this is one food I have to eat hot.
Liver Larb Thai Greatness
That’s it! Pretty easy, eh? Here’s what it will look like when you mix the sauce, liver, and veggies all together:
Our Larb Recipe Tweaks
Traditionally, this dish uses rice powder and organic palm sugar. One successful way to get around these 2 ingredients is to use a basic stevia tea extract with ground sesame instead of rice powder. This will give it a slightly different result, but it will still be very tasty if you blend the right amount of stevia tea in. If you cut the organic palm sugar in half, this Thai Larb recipe is still a low carb dish.
Why Liver Larb?
Liver is packed with nutrients. It can be made without the rice powder and palm sugar, but the organic palm sugar is the authentic Thai larb salad recipe way to make it. I’d try to leave the organic palm sugar and rice powder in. Larb gai (chicken) is also a popular variety of lab.
Thai Larb Recipe – Thai Pork Liver, Tab Wan
The only way I can really enjoy liver is with this exact recipe. I eat it as if liver is my favorite food in the world. By the way, it is pronounced, “laab.”
It is not pronounced “larb” or “larp.”
We hope you enjoy this quick and easy superfood liver recipe!
- 300 grams liver (pork)
- 3 whole limes (fresh squeezed)
- 30 grams culantro
- 48 grams cilantro
- 26 grams green onion
- 76 grams shallots (sliced)
- 15 grams organic palm sugar (stevia tea substitution makes it lower carb)
- 10 grams rice powder (gluten-free rice powder)
- 7 grams chili flakes (dried)
- 22 grams fish sauce
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Slice all the ingredients: liver, vegetables, and limes
First, you must slice and dice the ingredients. Slice the liver as well as the vegetables while separately creating the laab sauce in a side bowl.
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Boil water and make sauce.
Put together the palm sugar, rice powder, fish sauce and chili flakes and squeeze all the fresh lime wedges in as well. Mix it all together with a spoon. It should look similar to the red sauce pictured above.
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Blanche liver.
Blanche the liver. Once the water pot is boiling, take it off the pot and let it sit for 30 seconds before putting the raw liver in. Wait 45 seconds and then strain.
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Put it all together.
At this point you have 3 things – the sauce that’s waiting, the chopped vegetables, and the freshly cooked liver. Put them all together in a bowl and mix together.
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Enjoy!
The red and green peppers you see in the image are 100% optional (I added them in because it made the picture look better. Authentic Thai liver larb has no red and green peppers, just the veggies that we chopped up before hand.
- If you substitute the organic palm sugar for a stevia sugar replacement from the leaves (not the extract), it will taste the same and have very low carbs. With the organic palm sugar, it’s still a lower carb recipe.
- Rice powder is easier replaced as its role is to create a slightly grainy texture. We use ground sesame seeds to replace the rice powder. This was a proper substitute, but rice powder gives a better grainy consistency a larb Thai should have.
We made a video for this larb recipe! We have so many pictures that I just put them together and made a video from them. It might or might not be more convenient for you. The larb recipe video is just this blog post and images copied over to video form. You can follow along with the larb salad recipe video instead if you prefer.
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