**The Art of Making Tartar Sauce**

As I sit at home, I'm taking a break to enjoy some wine and get started on making my signature tartar sauce. The first step is to chop the lamb loin into fine pieces, ensuring that it's fresh and of high quality. I take pride in knowing that my butcher is reliable and provides only the best ingredients for my recipe.

As I begin to mix the chopped lamb with a paste made from various spices, including olive oil, chilies, and other seasonings, I make sure to incorporate all the flavors evenly. The goal is to create a sticky, thick sauce that's packed with flavor. One of the tricks I use is spreading the mixture out into an even layer, which helps me achieve the perfect balance of seasoning.

Next, I add salt to taste, using a technique similar to seasoning a steak. I also take the opportunity to incorporate some olive oil, which smooths out the flavors and brings everything together. The key is to get the seasoning just right, so I make sure to adjust the amount of spice according to my personal preference.

With the sauce base complete, I add diced shallots and toasted pine nuts to give it a nice texture and depth. I also incorporate some crispy shallots for added crunch, which complements the smoothness of the tartar sauce perfectly. To finish off the dish, I sprinkle some chopped fresh herbs on top, including parsley and dill.

To serve, I shape the tartar sauce into small balls or "meat quinells" – little football shapes that add a touch of elegance to the presentation. The pine nuts and shallots are arranged around the quinell, creating a visually appealing dish that's both flavorful and texturally interesting. For serving, we typically use rice crackers as a vessel, which helps to balance out the spiciness and adds a mild flavor.

One of the best things about this recipe is its versatility. While I originally created it for personal consumption, my grandmother has tried it and even mentioned that she'd like me to share the recipe with others. However, I've also noticed that my family members have been tempted to make it themselves when they see me preparing it at home.

For those interested in trying this tartar sauce recipe, I encourage you to visit the link provided below. There, you'll find a detailed guide on how to create this delicious condiment from scratch. Whether you're a seasoned chef or a culinary newcomer, this recipe is sure to inspire your next cooking project.

**The Recipe**

If you'd like to try making tartar sauce at home, be sure to check out the link below for more information and resources.

**About the Author**

For more articles and recipes from Indo Sato, please visit my blog or social media channels. I'm always happy to meet new people who share a passion for food and cooking.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthere's so many different ways to cook lob this version is actually the tartar version so it's kind of a combination of the northern Thai version of lob and kind of a Bangkok Style with the spices as well it's kind of my grandmother's secret recipe I guess it's less of a secret now but that's cool Nick bognar I'm from St Louis Missouri I have a restaurant called Indo and a restaurant called Sato lob is a dish done in so many different styles but most of the time right it's going to be kind of a mince meat or a ground meat that's mixed with like a lot of different spices and flavorings and Seasonings typically fish sauce and lime juice this one we definitely lean into the richness side just trying to get this kind of nice spicy deep rich tartar we don't really cut it with any acid or anything which is it kind of a unique style within itself too so the first thing we're going to do is toast all the spices for the Spice paste and I'm gonna make like a little parcel out of foil the bay leaves these are just black peppercorns a little bit of ground cinnamon coriander seed these are the caraway seeds some dried Thai Chili Peppers star anise you know it's got that kind of like licorice kind of flavor going on these are two whole seeds of nutmeg and then kind of the weirder one is the Indian long Pepper or Dilly and it's it's got a very unique flavor like kind of like a peppercorn but almost like an interesting like Umami like an underlining kind of flavor a couple cloves cardamom some sliced galanga which is like kind of like ginger root a lot of people compare it to Ginger but it's really just got this kind of like underlining kind of aromatic almost like perfumey kind of flavor yes oh no it definitely fell so I kind of make like a little tent but not too crazy and I just bring everything into like a pile which helps it all just kind of like roast slowly together we are gonna roast this at 300 degrees until we get all those aromatics going when we pull the spice out of the oven most important is just to pay attention to kind of the Aromas and the color a little bit so we want a nice dark golden brown but not burnt and kind of feeling like I smell like each of the spices individually and they all have their kind of characteristics really coming out so this only toasted for maybe a couple hours even a little less even that's fine too and now should be ready to go so now I'm just going to grind it up in our spice grinder and then we're just going to kind of get this into a nice smooth powder should almost look like coffee grounds or something by the time it's ready so I have this sauce pot here I'm going to turn it up to medium to kind of get the spices going first goes in the oil or I'm going to dump the spices into the oil just kind of mix it up a little bit and we're going to let that rock until we start to get a little bit of that Aroma if you have any little chunks don't worry about it we're only going to need a little bit of this paste to actually make the dish I typically save some of this stuff in my fridge actually one of my favorite things to do is take like sliced steak and make like a little like rice lettuce wraps and stuff and then just like a little dot of this on top there's a package of this that my grandmother made before she passed away and it's just like I'm never gonna use it I don't know I'm just like it sits in my freezer and it's like the most precious thing I have that I own Priceless lob spice I did try a little bit the other day still good you'll see this start to kind of like bubble up a little bit you know that's all good we want that kind of like caramelization to start I'm going to turn it down just a little bit more like a medium low and then I'm going to kind of just chop up this palm sugar so palm sugar is just like an unrefined sugar this flavor profile of it is very like specific to Thai food I feel like we use it a lot and with that amount of spice we're going to use quite a bit of palm sugar actually so it's just two cups of fish sauce you're already immediately gonna get kind of this like funky smell and the idea is that like there's so much dried spice and spiciness and sugar and then that balances with the strength of the fish sauce as well so kind of all three things become this one Amalgamated like strong flavor so yeah at this point I like to just kind of get some of the spices off the bottom of the pot and just kind of do a little bit of that but all these chunks of palm sugar are going to kind of evaporate slowly as you cook this down so now that this is bubbling off I'm going to turn the heat way down to basically as low as I can keep it and let it just kind of cook down until we get this into a thick paste and it is going to take a little while so you know usually I'll just work on the other components while that's going on I like to kind of prepare basically all the garnishes for actually mixing up these are pine nuts which for me just go really well with lamb pine nuts are definitely not a Thai ingredient so I got this pan kind of going at a medium and I'm going to add the pine nuts to that pine nuts and lamb are perfect together you know and so you kind of get this awesome like Mediterranean just a note of that and you know if it tastes good why not a little medium low action on these pine nuts and they're already getting pretty toasted we just want to see kind of like a uniform golden brown form and it doesn't take much all right so we're going to chop a few shallots for the actual mixture of the tartar just a little nice like small dice on that should be good and I'm just going to put that in the bowl I'm going to mix this up in and then I'm gonna pick some herbs real quick so we have Thai Basil of course and I'm just gonna rough pick some of these and it's nice if you have a couple of leaves that are small and not super ripped up you can make it look pretty and then some mint which for me with the lamb is huge and then one of the things that you actually see a lot in Thailand is Dill and you don't see you know it's not too much in like the states in Thai food but my grandmother used Dill a lot more than I think a lot of people would expect and so I just kind of go like one one to one and get a nice little herb salad going here and I'm gonna just Reserve that for when we start plating it up kind of more difficult thing to do is we're going to kind of cut up this piece of lamb here so this is a piece of lamb loin which is kind of like one of the leaner and yet also very clean pieces of the lamb and this one's been kind of rolled up a little bit so I'll just take it out like this and an easy ways to just kind of get flat with your knife and we're just going to try to get the the non-sinewy pieces of lamb loin here I know in Thailand they do use pork for tartar that's a little bit of a different vibe but definitely for the cooked version I see I think commonly you see a chicken used for like the cooked version of lob and that's probably the more simple version so now that I have this kind of trimmed up piece of lamb without any of this in you I'm going to try to make a really nice like kind of chopped up tartar with it so one of the easiest ways is to just start getting these kind of like thin slices and I kind of do this like the sushi chef way which is weird but and the thinner you get it the easier it will be to chop and I love using lamb loin for tartar in general because once you get it kind of chopped down and cleaned up like this it has such a rich flavor that I I think is just like awesome and and if you do it well especially with something so intense as like this spice paste any kind of like gaminess that you might be afraid of is just kind of hidden in the best way and you get this like really intense very Umami kind of flavor from every every kind of bite you get so now at this point everything's kind of chopped into small little cubes and then I just kind of start running my knife through this it does help if your nicest knife and sharp so once I've kind of done it over a few times this way I'm going to kind of flip this hole almost like Patty that I've made and just run through again if I'm at home I'm taking like a break to like drink some wine or something at this point chop chopping away it should look like some nice fine almost more fine than what you would get like a ground lamb or something like that and I think it's important that you chop your own lamb for this or at least understand like make sure your butcher is quality make sure the lamb loin is quality and it's fresh and make sure that you know you're not letting it sit out too long or anything like that keep it nice and cold and it's just going to be a better flavor if it's not already pre-ground so what I'll do now is take the lamb and just kind of add it to this bowl so now we're going to go back to this paste and check it out and what we got now is this super sticky cooked out spice paste a lot of the oil will have kind of risen to the top and that's okay we just want to kind of incorporate it back as it sits there a little bit and you can just tell that this is super thick and it's just going to be really really deep yeah I think a big part of this dish at this point since it is a tartar is to just make sure my seasoning is really nice so one of the tricks that I like to do is I'll just kind of spread it out into like one nice like even layer and it's just a seasoning trick really because at that point then I can take my salt almost like I'm seasoning a steak just like edge to edge on that protein and then what I'll do is kind of just to get this nice and smooth I'm going to take some olive oil I don't need a ton and then I'm going to get some of that lob spice going there's so many little variables that could be happening with the way you've cooked this or the just even just the chilies that you're able to get so we want to start to really get into our our tasting at this point too so I'm taking this olive oil and I'm just going to kind of make sure that I smooth out the the cooked out lob spice I'm gonna add a little bit more so it can get mixed in there and then I'm just going to start folding in the tartar with the shallots and the lob spice and a little bit of this oil is good too you'll see some of the all the chili peppers and the spice start to change the color of the Lamb a little bit we want to get it it's going to look nice and like kind of red which I think almost makes it really nice and pretty too that's actually good but I actually like it a little more spicy so I'm going to put a little bit more in there too Grandma liked it spicy way spicier than I could hand all kind of mixed up and we have enough fat I'm just going to put another drop of all olive oil in here now we're going to kind of add some of these textural things and the little dice shallot helps with the texture as well and then so I'm going to take some of those toasted pine nuts and a little bit of these crispy shallots that I always have around and these just come like in a package and then at this point I'm not going to kind of mix it super harshly I'm just going to kind of fold those in and that's pretty much the tartar portion like ready to go the pine nuts and the shallots even out the spiciness a little bit so what we do is we call it the meat quinell it's kind of a fancy like little football shapes to make it look nice on the plate and then I'm gonna do a little bit more of these pine nuts and I really like the crunchy shallots with this and I'm gonna go back to these herbs and what I'll do first is I'll do some ripped up guys and then that can hopefully get kind of incorporated into it I left my tweezers back in St Louis just kidding I only use chopsticks we mainly ate this with like raw vegetables which is great but for the restaurant we love to use kind of like these rice crackers and there we go a little rice crackers almost like Tartar and like bread or like some kind of vessel it definitely makes it a little bit more mild which is nice but just try to get a little bit of everything yo it turned out good I like this I think my grandma tried my version of her lob I think she would tell me that she liked it but then probably the next day like make her own for herself which is cool I I'd be really stuck if I could have that again you know for the recipe the link below please come and see me Indo Sato if you see me at the sushi bar please say hi foreignthere's so many different ways to cook lob this version is actually the tartar version so it's kind of a combination of the northern Thai version of lob and kind of a Bangkok Style with the spices as well it's kind of my grandmother's secret recipe I guess it's less of a secret now but that's cool Nick bognar I'm from St Louis Missouri I have a restaurant called Indo and a restaurant called Sato lob is a dish done in so many different styles but most of the time right it's going to be kind of a mince meat or a ground meat that's mixed with like a lot of different spices and flavorings and Seasonings typically fish sauce and lime juice this one we definitely lean into the richness side just trying to get this kind of nice spicy deep rich tartar we don't really cut it with any acid or anything which is it kind of a unique style within itself too so the first thing we're going to do is toast all the spices for the Spice paste and I'm gonna make like a little parcel out of foil the bay leaves these are just black peppercorns a little bit of ground cinnamon coriander seed these are the caraway seeds some dried Thai Chili Peppers star anise you know it's got that kind of like licorice kind of flavor going on these are two whole seeds of nutmeg and then kind of the weirder one is the Indian long Pepper or Dilly and it's it's got a very unique flavor like kind of like a peppercorn but almost like an interesting like Umami like an underlining kind of flavor a couple cloves cardamom some sliced galanga which is like kind of like ginger root a lot of people compare it to Ginger but it's really just got this kind of like underlining kind of aromatic almost like perfumey kind of flavor yes oh no it definitely fell so I kind of make like a little tent but not too crazy and I just bring everything into like a pile which helps it all just kind of like roast slowly together we are gonna roast this at 300 degrees until we get all those aromatics going when we pull the spice out of the oven most important is just to pay attention to kind of the Aromas and the color a little bit so we want a nice dark golden brown but not burnt and kind of feeling like I smell like each of the spices individually and they all have their kind of characteristics really coming out so this only toasted for maybe a couple hours even a little less even that's fine too and now should be ready to go so now I'm just going to grind it up in our spice grinder and then we're just going to kind of get this into a nice smooth powder should almost look like coffee grounds or something by the time it's ready so I have this sauce pot here I'm going to turn it up to medium to kind of get the spices going first goes in the oil or I'm going to dump the spices into the oil just kind of mix it up a little bit and we're going to let that rock until we start to get a little bit of that Aroma if you have any little chunks don't worry about it we're only going to need a little bit of this paste to actually make the dish I typically save some of this stuff in my fridge actually one of my favorite things to do is take like sliced steak and make like a little like rice lettuce wraps and stuff and then just like a little dot of this on top there's a package of this that my grandmother made before she passed away and it's just like I'm never gonna use it I don't know I'm just like it sits in my freezer and it's like the most precious thing I have that I own Priceless lob spice I did try a little bit the other day still good you'll see this start to kind of like bubble up a little bit you know that's all good we want that kind of like caramelization to start I'm going to turn it down just a little bit more like a medium low and then I'm going to kind of just chop up this palm sugar so palm sugar is just like an unrefined sugar this flavor profile of it is very like specific to Thai food I feel like we use it a lot and with that amount of spice we're going to use quite a bit of palm sugar actually so it's just two cups of fish sauce you're already immediately gonna get kind of this like funky smell and the idea is that like there's so much dried spice and spiciness and sugar and then that balances with the strength of the fish sauce as well so kind of all three things become this one Amalgamated like strong flavor so yeah at this point I like to just kind of get some of the spices off the bottom of the pot and just kind of do a little bit of that but all these chunks of palm sugar are going to kind of evaporate slowly as you cook this down so now that this is bubbling off I'm going to turn the heat way down to basically as low as I can keep it and let it just kind of cook down until we get this into a thick paste and it is going to take a little while so you know usually I'll just work on the other components while that's going on I like to kind of prepare basically all the garnishes for actually mixing up these are pine nuts which for me just go really well with lamb pine nuts are definitely not a Thai ingredient so I got this pan kind of going at a medium and I'm going to add the pine nuts to that pine nuts and lamb are perfect together you know and so you kind of get this awesome like Mediterranean just a note of that and you know if it tastes good why not a little medium low action on these pine nuts and they're already getting pretty toasted we just want to see kind of like a uniform golden brown form and it doesn't take much all right so we're going to chop a few shallots for the actual mixture of the tartar just a little nice like small dice on that should be good and I'm just going to put that in the bowl I'm going to mix this up in and then I'm gonna pick some herbs real quick so we have Thai Basil of course and I'm just gonna rough pick some of these and it's nice if you have a couple of leaves that are small and not super ripped up you can make it look pretty and then some mint which for me with the lamb is huge and then one of the things that you actually see a lot in Thailand is Dill and you don't see you know it's not too much in like the states in Thai food but my grandmother used Dill a lot more than I think a lot of people would expect and so I just kind of go like one one to one and get a nice little herb salad going here and I'm gonna just Reserve that for when we start plating it up kind of more difficult thing to do is we're going to kind of cut up this piece of lamb here so this is a piece of lamb loin which is kind of like one of the leaner and yet also very clean pieces of the lamb and this one's been kind of rolled up a little bit so I'll just take it out like this and an easy ways to just kind of get flat with your knife and we're just going to try to get the the non-sinewy pieces of lamb loin here I know in Thailand they do use pork for tartar that's a little bit of a different vibe but definitely for the cooked version I see I think commonly you see a chicken used for like the cooked version of lob and that's probably the more simple version so now that I have this kind of trimmed up piece of lamb without any of this in you I'm going to try to make a really nice like kind of chopped up tartar with it so one of the easiest ways is to just start getting these kind of like thin slices and I kind of do this like the sushi chef way which is weird but and the thinner you get it the easier it will be to chop and I love using lamb loin for tartar in general because once you get it kind of chopped down and cleaned up like this it has such a rich flavor that I I think is just like awesome and and if you do it well especially with something so intense as like this spice paste any kind of like gaminess that you might be afraid of is just kind of hidden in the best way and you get this like really intense very Umami kind of flavor from every every kind of bite you get so now at this point everything's kind of chopped into small little cubes and then I just kind of start running my knife through this it does help if your nicest knife and sharp so once I've kind of done it over a few times this way I'm going to kind of flip this hole almost like Patty that I've made and just run through again if I'm at home I'm taking like a break to like drink some wine or something at this point chop chopping away it should look like some nice fine almost more fine than what you would get like a ground lamb or something like that and I think it's important that you chop your own lamb for this or at least understand like make sure your butcher is quality make sure the lamb loin is quality and it's fresh and make sure that you know you're not letting it sit out too long or anything like that keep it nice and cold and it's just going to be a better flavor if it's not already pre-ground so what I'll do now is take the lamb and just kind of add it to this bowl so now we're going to go back to this paste and check it out and what we got now is this super sticky cooked out spice paste a lot of the oil will have kind of risen to the top and that's okay we just want to kind of incorporate it back as it sits there a little bit and you can just tell that this is super thick and it's just going to be really really deep yeah I think a big part of this dish at this point since it is a tartar is to just make sure my seasoning is really nice so one of the tricks that I like to do is I'll just kind of spread it out into like one nice like even layer and it's just a seasoning trick really because at that point then I can take my salt almost like I'm seasoning a steak just like edge to edge on that protein and then what I'll do is kind of just to get this nice and smooth I'm going to take some olive oil I don't need a ton and then I'm going to get some of that lob spice going there's so many little variables that could be happening with the way you've cooked this or the just even just the chilies that you're able to get so we want to start to really get into our our tasting at this point too so I'm taking this olive oil and I'm just going to kind of make sure that I smooth out the the cooked out lob spice I'm gonna add a little bit more so it can get mixed in there and then I'm just going to start folding in the tartar with the shallots and the lob spice and a little bit of this oil is good too you'll see some of the all the chili peppers and the spice start to change the color of the Lamb a little bit we want to get it it's going to look nice and like kind of red which I think almost makes it really nice and pretty too that's actually good but I actually like it a little more spicy so I'm going to put a little bit more in there too Grandma liked it spicy way spicier than I could hand all kind of mixed up and we have enough fat I'm just going to put another drop of all olive oil in here now we're going to kind of add some of these textural things and the little dice shallot helps with the texture as well and then so I'm going to take some of those toasted pine nuts and a little bit of these crispy shallots that I always have around and these just come like in a package and then at this point I'm not going to kind of mix it super harshly I'm just going to kind of fold those in and that's pretty much the tartar portion like ready to go the pine nuts and the shallots even out the spiciness a little bit so what we do is we call it the meat quinell it's kind of a fancy like little football shapes to make it look nice on the plate and then I'm gonna do a little bit more of these pine nuts and I really like the crunchy shallots with this and I'm gonna go back to these herbs and what I'll do first is I'll do some ripped up guys and then that can hopefully get kind of incorporated into it I left my tweezers back in St Louis just kidding I only use chopsticks we mainly ate this with like raw vegetables which is great but for the restaurant we love to use kind of like these rice crackers and there we go a little rice crackers almost like Tartar and like bread or like some kind of vessel it definitely makes it a little bit more mild which is nice but just try to get a little bit of everything yo it turned out good I like this I think my grandma tried my version of her lob I think she would tell me that she liked it but then probably the next day like make her own for herself which is cool I I'd be really stuck if I could have that again you know for the recipe the link below please come and see me Indo Sato if you see me at the sushi bar please say hi foreign\n"