I think I've figured out a good trick for making Pad Thai at home — prep as
many portions as you want, but only cook one or two portions at a time. This is
especially helpful if you don't have a big wok and/or a super-powerful stove. It might sound
onerous to only cook a little at a time, but wait until you see how fast it cooks.
Pad Thai of course is a noodle-based stir fry in a sweet and sour sauce.
To me, the sauce's defining ingredients are Thai-style fish sauce — basically
salty fermented fish juice — and extract of the tamarind fruit. Had
to get this at my Asian market. This is the concentrate, which I prefer to tamarind paste.
It'll be our primary source of acidity, though some people use vinegar or lime instead.
In a pinch, you could replace both of these ingredients with
Worcestershire sauce. This is a vinegary fermented fish sauce flavored with — wait
for it — tamarind. It wouldn't be exactly the same but it would do the same job.
And I suppose the other key ingredient is sugar. The Pad Thai that I know and love
from Thai-American restaurants is insanely sweet.
I'm using two or three tablespoons of sugar for two large portions.
A lot of people use brown sugar or various less-refined sugars. They'd all work.
About a tablespoon of fish sauce. Smells like feet, tastes like meat — very strong
source of umami. You only need a little. And you could use soy sauce instead to
keep it meatless. I like a little bit of soy with the fish sauce. Maybe a teaspoon.
Now the tamarind extract. I'm using two teaspoons of the concentrate,
but you know about me and acidity. You might want to start with half this
quantity. I also love the smooth, glossy texture that you get from the concentrate.
If I diluted this with like two parts water to one part concentrate, I'd get about the same strength
as tamarind paste. I'm not bothering because I'm gonna add some water to the pan at the very end.
Now, the secret ingredient to what I'll describe as "mall Pad Thai" here in the States is ketchup.
Before anybody sneers, consider that many Pad Thai recipes call for vinegar, sugar and tomato
paste — well, guess what ketchup is. This lightens the color and also makes the sauce more glossy.
I put in almost two tablespoons in there. You have to play with the basic proportions to
find out what you like. And of course you could just buy a jarred Pad Thai
sauce. That's still a little gritty, but the sugar will dissolve as we do everything else.
A big handful of peanuts for garnish. I'll chop those up a bit — not too fine. The
whole point is to have some crunchy texture against the soft noodles.
Today is a good day to have little prep bowls.
One bunch of green onions. You could use any onion, but these are good for my method because
they cook almost instantly if you slice the whites really thin. And then you have the greens
up here that you can set aside and use as a raw garnish. The rest will go into my aromatics bowl.
Fresh ginger. A little thumb-size piece. Slice off the skin and chop it up. A roughly equal
amount of garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped. Don't go too fine on the garlic or it'll
be liable to burn here. Into the aromatics bowl with that. Then I'ma do one red chili,
thinly sliced. I'm leaving behind the top which is where a lot of the heat lives.
I'm gonna pick a big pile of cilantro leaves for garnish. Highly optional.
The other table garnish will be some lime wedges,
which you probably won't need if you use as much tamarind concentrate as I do.
Oh, and mung bean sprouts. These came washed and prepped,
I just need to have the open bag handy. Now, protein. A couple eggs. Vegans can
totally skip them. These scramble so much better if you salt them pretty heavily,
beat thoroughly and then let them sit for like 10 minutes. The salt kinda loosens the proteins
and it helps them cook in these delicate thin sheets that I like in a stir fry.
Time for the mother and child reunion. One chicken breast should be enough protein for
two dinner-size portions. Shrimp or tofu work great as well. The trick with the
chicken breast is to cut it into three sections and then make very thin slices
across the grain. You should be able to see the meat fibers plain as day. Cut across them.
I'm basically slicing as thinly as I can across those fibers. It helps to
have a freshly sharpened knife for this. Cutting across the grain will get us much
more tender pieces — thin meat slices in stir fry tend to be chewy. Now I'll
push those in to two separate piles for my two big portions that I'm cooking.
Gotta keep my salt handy, and my final ingredient will be some water.
Stir fries go so fast that you want to have every single thing prepped before you actually cook.
I've got all my ingredients within arm's reach, and I'll scan my grocery receipt
into the sponsor of this video, Fetch Rewards. Let's thank them before we cook.
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I bought a bunch of gear on Amazon recently, so bam, I got a ton of points back. This works
with any and all retail receipts. Then you hit the rewards button and exchange your points
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Sign up using my link in the description. Use my code RAGUSEA and you'll get 3,000 points when you
scan your first receipt. Download with my link, use my code RAGUSEA, get yourself 3,000 points.
That's a limited-time offer for you. Try it. Link is in the description. Thank you, Fetch.
Now, I find Pad Thai way easier to cook in a nonstick pan. This makes it foolproof.
And I'm gonna boil my noodles right in here. There's no need to get a second pan dirty,
and water boils in a flash in a wide pan. A little pinch of salt there. Heat on high. Rice
noodles sold for Pad Thai are usually flat and narrow, though you can use wider ones.
Half of this package will feed two people — two ounces or 60 grams per portion. And I'm sure
this is gonna make some people unhappy, but I've been breaking these as I put them in the water.
If I don't the noodles are so long that I have a lot of trouble integrating them with the sauce and
other ingredients at the end. I'm just stirring to make sure they don't stick to the bottom.
I think the more traditional way to cook Thai rice noodles is to cover them in boiling water from a
kettle or something and then let them steep. I have found straight-up boiling to be quicker and
easier to control, and I'm only gonna parboil them. 2-3 minutes max. Then in this goes to a
strainer and I'll shock with cold water to stop them from cooking and sticking to each other.
Let that hang and drain and they'll hold there until I'm ready to finish cooking them.
I'll wipe out my pan real quick, back on the stove, heat on high. You can get away
with high heat in a nonstick pan as long as you keep the pan full of food to absorb that energy.
I'm using that bit of virgin oil as a thermometer. The instant I see it just start to smoke,
I'll season my first pile of chicken real quick and then
drop it in the pan. Get the pieces pushed out into a single, flat layer.
Wash my hand real quick, and then from here on out, I'm showing you this in
real time. I'm not speeding any of this up. By letting the meat just sit there,
we can get a little brown color on it without overcooking the interior. They're gonna cook
most of the way on that side. When I can see the bottom two thirds of these is opaque,
I'm gonna throw in half of my aromatics — the green onions, the chili, the garlic, the ginger.
And then once they're in, I'm gonna stir everything really aggressively.
The top of the chicken is still raw, and that's just fine. This is exactly how I would do it with
whole shrimp too, by the way, for the same dish. I tried it that way, it was great.
I wanted to devise a process that did not involve cooking a bunch of things one at a time,
dumping them out, putting them back in again. Lots of recipes have you do that. I didn't want to do
that. I just want to put things things in the pan and keep them there. So I've pushed everything
over to one side of the pan, and the chicken should still not be quite cooked. That's fine.
Time for half of the beaten eggs, in a really thin layer. Spread it around, let it sit and
start to solidify. Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it — then you can scrape at it with the spoon,
and this gets you those thin sheets of egg that are really nice in a stir fry. Salting the eggs
also helps them to not overcook even when you get some color on them, which is what I'm trying to
do here. The salt loosens those proteins so they don't squeeze out all the water out of the egg.
So we'll push all of that egg to one side, go over to the sink and grab some of those par-boiled
noodles, and there they go. They'll finish now. Half of my sauce is gonna go in next — or maybe
less than half. You can always add more. I suppose I like my Pad Thai very saucy. So in goes half of
that sauce. Then I'm gonna grab a big handful of those mung bean sprouts. I like a lot of those.
I mean, really, I like half bean sprouts, half noodles. That's way healthier, too.
I also like to get some of the peanuts mixed through everything — we'll garnish with some
at the end, but a little peanuts all the way through. Then stir stir stir stir. Some people
prefer to keep the bean sprouts totally raw — add them at the end. I like for them
to basically blend in with the noodles, and you can kinda mistake them for the noodles.
They're just barely gonna cook anyway, because we're almost done here. I like to keep my sauce
really tight and dry — not much water in the sauce, that's why I didn't dilute anything — so
that now, at the very end, I can just add as much water as I want to get that level of saucy texture
that I desire. So, I'm just gonna wait until this is looking pretty much as mixed as I can get it.
And grab the water. And grab the water. This is weird to do in real time.
There we go. And that just deglazes the pan too, which is really, really nice.
And we'll just give that a few seconds to cook and
tighten up again. The water helps you get everything really smoothly mixed together.
If we were cooking several portions at once in in this little pan, we just wouldn't be able
to get the intense heat that gives a stir fry its characteristic flavor. You need a big wok
on a rip-roaring burner for that. But for one big dinner portion, this is perfect. Beautiful. Done.
Garnishes on the side. Pile of cilantro, more peanuts to sprinkle on top for heterogeneity,
lime for squeezing, and maybe I'll put the onion greens on top. Man I love this stuff. The feet
smell of fish sauce boils right out, don't worry about that. It's gone. And check the chicken
pieces — brown, and yet not overcooked. That's quite a magic trick with thin piece of white meat.
And now you can turn around and do the next portion which should take literally no more than
three minutes, as we have just proven. Please do not take this as an attempt at definitive,
authentic Pad Thai. It's just how I've gotten the best results in my kitchen,
chasing the version of the dish that I know and love.
And since may favorite Thai place where I live just closed,
I am very happy to have cracked this nut to my own satisfaction.