Check it, if you’re not already on the Cooking in Real Time podcast tip:
Cooking in Real Time Episode 7: Pad Thai and Cucumber Salad
Wherein I only barely remember all of the damn ingredients that go into pad thai. And wherein I utterly fail to make a joke about pad-casting–wasted opportunity!
But really, if you’ve been meaning to kick the takeout habit, this is a good place to start.
PS: If you like the podcast, I’d hugely appreciate reviews/mega-tons of stars on iTunes. You can review without subscribing, even.
It’s almost as though you knew of my plan for a zine in which I travel around the Middle Tennessee area and try the pad thai at each place that sells it and then I write a review zine about it.
Now that I can see how it’s made, I don’t need to do that.
OMG, though, that’s a great idea.
And then it could be a franchise mag, like the Edible [City] magazines. Pad Thai Middle Tennessee, Pad Thai Eastern Queens, Pad Thai Albuquerque…. Hee.
Have you seen the Chez Pim Pad Thai explanation?
I love it. It _changed my life_ in Spain.
I did read that. She makes a lot of sense. Though I really don’t think you need a wok. In fact, using a wok _forces_ you to make one serving at a time, because of the way the heat is (not) distributed. In a big skillet, you can make up to four servings.
Also, never having gotten my hands on palm sugar, I think it works just fine with regular white sugar.
Oh, and speaking of life-changing… I remember the first time I read a pad thai recipe–I never knew that tamarind was involved! It’s not a really obvious thing.
Which brings me to one other small quibble with Chez Pim–she smacks down recipes that call for ketchup, and truly, no one living in a remotely cosmopolitan place needs to use ketchup. But as a stand-in for tamarind, it’s not a complete disaster. It’s got the same properties you want in pad thai–tangy and a little sweet. So I can see why it worked its way into so many recipes (the best Thai cookbook we have, which is from the 70s, calls for ketchup). I have actually made desperation pad thai with ketchup and it’s not so terrible. But I wouldn’t choose ketchup over tamarind, of course.
I found that Pim’s advice on Pad Thai was a god-send in terms of the process involved. By working from her recipe and tweaking it a bit based on others I’ve found, I was able to make a fantastic dish. It does take some practice though. My first attempt, the noodles got a tad overdone because I added a little water to them before the sauce. The next time, however, they came out great.
Also — make a batch of sauce ahead of time rather than some recipes that call for adding the various individual ingredients one at a time. The cooking is so quick you can’t adjust the taste on the fly. But if you make the sauce ahead of time, you can adjust it before you cook.
Lastly, I use tamarind. However, there are probably some citrusy/sour alternatives. Lime, vinegar, maybe even pomegranite. Who knows. I have a great thai cookbook from 1985 that doesn’t even mention tamarind for pad thai, probably because it was not available back then.
Mikey