- She's gonna be making a dish, what in Thai is called
Pad phet and that essentially means like stir-fry chili.
The meat stir fried with a bunch of curry paste
and chilies and herbs.
Oh, that's good.
Good morning, everyone.
It's Mark Wiens with Migrationology.com.
It's about seven a.m. in Bangkok
and we are walking to the market.
My mother-in-law is going to make a Thai dish
that I really love and that's very unique and very spicy.
So, my mother-in-law is cooking and I'm gonna
share the recipe with you today.
At typical morning markets in Bangkok, you have
many, many normal stalls selling all sorts of different
vegetables and chicken and pork and beef and seafood vendors
and then usually also at Bangkok markets,
they have one or two stalls that serve jungle ingredients,
real, real country-side herbs and ingredients
and we are going to the country stall, the jungle stall.
We are in luck.
My mother-in-law wasn't sure if they were gonna have
these wild ducks, which in Thai are called nuk phet nahm
but luckily they do so she has already piled
two wild ducks into the basket and we're gonna get
two wild ducks and then they have just all sorts of
wild jungle ingredients here.
There are crickets and all sorts of mushrooms.
There's silkworms.
There are herbs.
It all depends.
We're not sure what they have every week or every day.
They have a different selection of wild animals,
wild birds, and ingredients, so today I'm pretty happy
that we got the wild ducks.
I do enjoy cooking sometimes but I'm not even close,
not even comparable to how good
my mother-in-law is at cooking.
She's one of the best cooks I know in the entire world.
So, I'm gonna, Micah and I are gonna watch mom
as she cooks and then I'm just gonna
narrate the whole recipe.
And as I'm standing here, I'm just seeing that she's
making some dried fish.
I think these are mullet, little mullet fish
and last night she rinsed them in salt water
and now she's drying them in the sun.
She makes all kinds of awesome food at this house.
Okay, so we got the ducks
She wants to just roast it over the fire
to take off all the hair.
That already smells good.
It smells like roast duck.
In Thai, they are called nuk phet nam,
which are, I think it's some kind of wild duck.
In Thai it would translate directly to "water duck"
and I would also say that you could,
whatever recipe she's gonna make right now
which we're all about to find out all the ingredients
she adds to it, but you could probably substitute any kind
of meat, whether you want chicken or beef or anything
'cause we're gonna mince them up.
And now, after roasting all the feather stubs off the ducks,
now comes the time where she's gonna
rinse off the ducks and clean them.
She's going the extra mile with tweezers
to pull out all of the feathers.
You don't wanna bite into a hard feather.
She's about to chop off that head.
I probably won't show too many details.
It got a little bloody but basically she
took out all of the organs of the duck
and kind of took out everything from the cavity.
The last time she made this recipe,
she included all the bones.
Like, the entire duck, apart from the head, I think.
Chopped it all up, minced it all up,
but it was pretty kinda on the crunchy side.
I got some bone shards stuck in my teeth
so this time I asked her to take out the bigger bones
but she said she's still gonna mince up the,
I think the rib cage and smaller bones.
And then after she finishes doing that,
we'll be ready to stir fry it up with all the spices
and all the chilies.
Okay, 15 minutes later.
The ducks have been transformed into a full mince
and we are moving back over to the street food cart.
The first step is the mei phakchī,
which are coriander seeds.
She's just gonna dry roast.
And then also some yihra, cumin.
Oh, yes the aroma of that dry roasting yihra or cumin
is just amazing.
And again, all of these ingredients,
I'm gonna write all of these in full recipe
but we've also got, this is called bayira.
I think they might also be called tree basil
and then we've also got some galangal.
This is young galangal.
Oh, and as I'm speaking, she is finished roasting
those spices and she's dumping them into the mortar.
And then set aside those dry spices
and next step is to take that minced meat
and just stir fry it.
Oh, that smells delicious.
That smells like cooking duck.
A little bit of a gamey smell to it.
What we're gonna do for this recipe,
is we're gonna prepare all of the ingredients separately.
So, stir fry the meat, get all the spices ready,
and then after that, we're gonna assemble the entire thing
by stir frying it all together.
The duck is finished stir frying
and she's draining out all that oil.
You can see it.
Down below there is all the oil
but we just want the meat, the dry meat.
Next step it to pound up the garlic and chilies.
And she's gonna put in a big handful of chilies.
So you just wanna pull off those stems
and then drop them into the mortar with the garlic
and pound those up.
You wanna just pound up the garlic and chilies
until you've got kind of a coarse grind to them.
Just no big chunks.
For the next step, she's taking young galangal
and slicing it up really thin
and she's gonna add it to this recipe.
I would say that in the majority of Thai recipes,
galangal is normally used just to be included with soups
and then it's boiled and the flavor's extracted
and you don't eat it but in this recipe,
since it's young galangal, we're gonna eat it
as long as it's chopped up small like that
and it provides some awesome flavor.
Today, for this recipe, we have some bayira
but you could also make this recipe with basil.
Holy basil is really good also
but I'm really loving these jeera leaves right now.
Kind of almost like licoricey but sweet and kind of,
yeah, just a unique wonderful herb flavor to them.
They are delicious and I can actually smell them right now
as she's breaking them off the stems.
And then one more awesome ingredient we have over here
are green peppercorns,
which are another powerful flavor enhancer
and she's just rinsing off those jeera leaves.
And I think just because they're so big,
she's gonna give it a coarse chop.
Otherwise, you could just leave them whole.
And then in go those green peppercorns.
Give them a quick wash and then she's just
lightly chopping them as well,
just so you don't get an entire strand of peppercorns
in your mouth at once in one bite.
Everything's prepared.
Oh, she's about to add in the oil right now
but we've got, she's gonna add in some oil
and then we're just gonna assemble everything,
including that duck.
And then, first inside the oil goes in all of the
chilies and garlic that we pounded up.
If it gets too dry, you can add in a little bit of water.
This is a Southern Thai curry paste.
And that's a good, like, three or four tablespoons, I think.
And then again, if that gets too dry,
you can add in a little bit of water.
And next step is to add all that duck, that minced meat.
Oh, that smells so good.
Next goes in all of the galangal.
And then those dried spices, which is the coriander seeds
and the jeera, cumin and then just stir fry all that up.
One of the beauties of this dish is that you
have all of the ingredients prepared
and so then when you're cooking it, you basically just
assemble everything and you stir fry it pretty quickly.
And now for the jeera leaves.
And you wanna put those in at the very end
'cause you don't want to cook them very long.
You want them to remain fresh and just have all of
their natural flavor but just wilt them into the dish.
You can really smell the aroma of the jeera leaves,
as soon as she adds it in there.
Oh, it's beautiful.
It's like a sweet, licoricy but like spicy aroma.
Okay, here's my taste test time.
Oh, that's good.
Oh and then final step is to add in some Kaffir lime leaves.
She just wrapped them up and is really finely slicing them.
And that was the final step.
She just threw in the Kaffir lime leaves
and just stir fried it just for a couple more seconds.
Oh, that spoon.
This guy, Micah, slept through the entire recipe.
One more thing that my mother-in-law just mentioned
is that she didn't need to add any extra fish sauce or salt
because the curry paste already had salt in it
and I think probably it also had shrimp paste in it
which gave it some saltiness.
But you gotta taste test.
There's no way of making Thai food without taste testing.
If you do need to add,
if it needs more salt, add in some fish sauce.
My mother-in-law also cooked a few other dishes,
including that dried fish that was
drying earlier in the morning.
She fried a couple of those up.
And then have the pad phet, the main duck dish
and then also a curry, gang, I think yùak glûay,
which is banana trunk.
It's a banana trunk curry with a gangate,
which is a coconut milk curry.
And I have to begin with the nuk bet nahm pad phet,
which is the fried curry herbal everything duck, wild duck.
You gotta just come take a
really, really close up look at this.
You can just see the seeds of all the chilies.
You can see the herbs in there,
the little chunks of galangal in there.
It is just an absolutely beautiful sight.
Oh, yes.
Okay, I'm going in for that immediately first.
It's amazing.
The flavor density is so high.
So many flavors going on in there.
I can taste those little chunks of galangal.
I can also really taste the jeera leaves.
Those are absolutely delicious
and they have a different twist of a flavor
from sweet basil or a holy basil.
It's spicy and then the actual wild duck
tastes similar to a normal duck but with maybe
a little bit of a gamier, just slightly gamier,
actually most of the gaminess is kinda masked by
all those herbs and spices.
That is just awesome.
And next up for the curry.
These are the pieces of the banana stalk
and then I think there's chicken in here.
Stick this onto my rice over here.
Those banana stalks, they're a little bit chewy
and slightly like slimy.
Finally, let me grab one of those fried fish,
fried dried fish.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, it's nice and salty and then crispy.
Oh, she made it really, really good.
Let me get that head in this bite.
Oh yeah.
Thank you very much to my mother-in-law for making the food
and for showing us all of that recipe
and thank you all very much for watching this recipe.
I think that pad phet is one of my
ultimate favorite Thai dishes.
There's so much,
that's just an ultimate stir fry dish that you can make
and so I will write all of the ingredients
over on my blog, Eatingthaifood.com
so you can head over there to see all of the ingredients
and I will write the whole recipe there.
Thank you very much for watching this recipe
about awesome Thai food.
Please remember to give this video a thumbs up
if you enjoyed it.
And if you're not already subscribed,
make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel
for lots more food and travel videos.
And thank you again for watching.
I will see you on the next video.