![]() It goes without saying that all of us can, and should, make the exact food we want to eat in the exact way that we want to make it, but also try to imagine how we might feel if someone told me they made our grandmother’s famous chicken soup recipe but they don’t use chicken or noodles and also changed all of the vegetables, they just call it our grandmother’s chicken soup. But my roadmap, rules, have always been that I want to know the difference and to be able to talk about why I’m making the changes I have. Does it matter? Does it matter that if I Googled it because I did, in fact, want to learn how to make it, that I’m unlikely to from these recipes? That maybe they’re delicious, but they’re not really pad thai? Of course, on this site, nary a recipe is devoutly aligned with the textbook version I make changes based on personal taste, recipe ease, and more, and I do so here as well. * The thing I noticed is that if you Google “pad thai recipe,” the first page of results has recipes that include fettuccine, bell peppers, peanut butter, honey, ketchup, napa cabbage, cilantro, butter, lemon, not to mention rice vinegar, soy sauce, Thai basil, mint, and more, which might sound closer to the region but aren’t actually typical in this. My biggest change: Hearkening back to my vegetarian days, I’ve always ordered pad thai with tofu (instead of the more traditional shrimp, or less traditional pork or chicken), and it’s the only way I crave it now. And below that are a collection of suggestions of ingredients swaps I’ve pulled from the web. Below is a recipe I mashed together from Pim, the dozen videos I found on YouTube of street vendors making pad thai (a very dangerous thing to do on an empty stomach), from Leela Punyaratabandhu’s excellent Simple Thai Food. And what took me so long to make it was trying to find a way to make peace with keeping the ingredients authentic* while finding swaps that might work if you’re a hundred miles from the nearest Thai grocery store.**Įventually, though, my hunger for a recipe I could make when I craved it, which is weekly, won, which brings us up to today. And, I’d argue, in descending order, bean sprouts (lightness and crunch), preserved radishes (a sweet/sour crunch), garlic chives, and palm sugar. ![]() ![]() Fish sauce is up there too (it makes things salty and nuanced). While if it was simply a garnish here, you’d probably be fine without it, but something like tamarind isn’t a maybe ingredient in pad thai, it’s, in fact, one of the most essential flavors - providing the sour tang. So if I read this for the first time in 2007, why did it take me until 2018 to finally make it? Largely because the ingredients, depending on where you live, can be hard to get. That simply means you can’t do many servings at once.” This doesn’t mean you cannot feed a crowd, you simply prep as much as you’d need, but only cook a portion or two at a time. Finally, she wants us to never make more than two portions at once, which will lead to “clumps of oily, sticky noodles.” She explains that the textures and flavors of a proper pad thai “derive largely from the way the dish is cooked, that is to say its quick footloose dance in an ultra hot wok. And she wants you to make extra because it keeps well, and then if your dish needs a little more oomph, you won’t have to run back to the fridge to measure more from bottles and jars. First, she wants you to make the sauce in advance because the ingredients are not standardized - fish sauces and tamarind concentrates will vary in intensity between brands - and you’ll want to adjust as needed, not over a screaming hot pan while your noodles get soft. As pad thai is one of the most popular street foods in Thailand, she encouraged us to approach it at home the way the street vendors do: the prep is already done, so you can finish it in a flash. It received a Michelin star a year after it opened because why do anything mediocre?īut in 2007, she wrote a seminal post called Pad Thai For Beginners that I’ve read and reread so many times over the years, I’ve practically memorized it. Pim wrote Chez Pim for many years before moving onto make jams (still the best apricot I’ve ever had) and then, homesick for the food she missed from growing up in Bangkok and disappointed by the versions of Thai food she saw in American restaurants (and “the tyranny of peanut sauce”), opened her first restaurant, Kin Khao, in San Francisco in 2014. Like a lot of people who go way back in the land of food blogs, I learned how to make pad thai from Pim Techamuanvivit. ![]()
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