Easy, Authentic Pad Thai Recipe

I promise this will be better than any takeout you’ve ever had.

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You don’t need a flight to Thailand for a great pad thai. You just need noodles, a few simple ingredients, and the right technique. Start off by covering your rice noodles with room temperature water. These noodles are different than the type of pasta you’d use for Italian cuisine. Instead, they need to soften just enough where they’ll be that perfect texture once you finish cooking your pad thai. Once fully submerged, I’ll set these off to the side and let them rest for about an hour or until they’re a little bit softer and more malleable. For our sauce, I’ll start by chopping up some palm sugar. This is a really common sugar used in a lot of Thai and Southeast Asian cuisine, and it’ll work wonders for that pad thai sauce we’re making. But if you can’t find it, that’s fine. Just use a regular white sugar or a mixture of white sugar and some brown sugar. Once it’s all chopped up, add it to a small pot or skillet because we’ll need to caramelize the sugar to bring out all that flavor. Onto a burner over low heat, we’ll get a rubber spatula and stir constantly. Caramelizing our sugar is one of the things that’s going to separate a good pad thai from a great pad thai. It’s going to bring out almost this toffee-like flavor in our sauce. Once the sugar clumps up like this, the caramelization is going to happen very quickly. We’re looking for that classic golden brown, almost honeylike color. And don’t be afraid to also use your nose and smell how far along that caramelization is. Look here, you’ll see the color is starting to change rapidly. This is where that caramelization is happening. And now we really just need a few more seconds to let that color change occur. Right away, I’ll add in my tamarind paste. It’s going to sort of slow down the cooking process to hold our sugar at that nice amber color here. And don’t worry if it clumps up like this cuz it’s going to melt down again in our sauce. And then we’ll also add in some fish sauce. That one smells really bad, but it tastes really good if you use it in the right way. And finally, a little splash of water. And that will complete our sauce. The only last step here is to just bring that back up to a simmer. That’ll let our sugar melt down again. And our sauce is done. To start our ingredient prep, I’ll take some tofu. This has already been pressed and dried, but I’m going to continue to dry it cuz the drier the tofu, the better the texture will be in your pad thai. And I’ll cut this into a very fine dice. The goal is to get these perfect, really nice, defined little cubes. The texture of every ingredient in your pad thai is so incredibly important. So during all this ingredient prep, really make sure that everything is cut with precision. It shouldn’t take you too long, and you’re really going to notice it in the taste and texture of your final pad thai. If I’ve done this correctly, all my cubes should be almost the same exact size. The last thing I’ll do with these before adding them back to a bowl is give them one last pat dry. And I’m even going to line my bowl with paper towels before I add these back in. This way I can continue to soak up some of that extra moisture as I prep the rest of my ingredients. Moving on, let’s chop our shallots. Chop off the tops and then cut them all in half. This will make it easy to chop them and also easier to remove that skin. Although I will admit that removing the skin on an onion is never really easy. Someone needs to find a better way to do that. Shallots are traditional in a pie over regular onions. And they also have this really nice sweeter, more delicate flavor. It’s not a bad idea to just do one little safety chop to make sure you didn’t miss any cuts. And once your shallots look like this, you can move on. Now, garlic. That might be the tallest stem I’ve seen on a head of garlic before. First, smash it. And depending on how much you like garlic and the size of your garlic cloves, go ahead and separate however many cloves you think you’ll want. For this recipe, I’m going to use about eight. Before I chop, I’m going to smash the cloves one more time to make it quicker and easier. And because I have so many, I’m just going to mince them all up at once. I will remind you here that there is no great substitute for fresh minced garlic. I know it makes your fingers smell bad and can be a little annoying to peel all the cloves, but the taste makes it so worth it. So, this is actually interesting. Whenever I mince my garlic, I try not to go too too small, especially if I’m cooking a dish like this at high heat because garlic tends to burn so fast. So, leaving slightly bigger pieces helps to make sure that that doesn’t happen. But also, I actually kind of like the idea of having slightly larger little bits of garlic. So, you get these little pops of garlic flavor while you’re eating. This looks perfect. See, it’s so satisfying to mince it yourself. Look at that. You could never get that out of a jar. A little bit more prep left. I have now some dried shrimp. I’m going to give that a really rough chop just cuz otherwise it can be a little bit tough in your pad thai. And the reason I’m using this dried shrimp in addition to regular shrimp is it’s going to boost that shrimpy flavor in my pad thai. Same thing with our peanuts. Give those a quick rough chop as well. In a pad thai, I really love if the peanuts are in these nice little crumbles, but also sometimes you get a little bit of that peanut dust. Great texture, great flavor. Also, I don’t like shells, so sometimes I’ll just blow them all off on the top of the peanuts. Nice little trick. The last thing we need to prep a few of these garlic chives. I’m going to grab about 10 of these. This is a really beautiful herb that tastes a little bit like a mixture between garlic and scallions. And they’re also super fragrant. And with these, I’m just going to chop them into nice little bits like this. And they’re going to cook and get sort of wilted in our pad thai. The nice thing is some are sort of crunchier and have a bit of a stronger flavor. Whereas these ones here are much lighter and are going to be much softer in the pad thai. So they give some great texture. With all our ingredients prepped, it is time to cook. Walk over the heat. If you don’t have a walk, use a large sauté pan, but make sure you’re using very high heat. See the pan’s already starting to smoke here. And then in I’ll go with some oil, which I’m going to let get very hot and swirl around the pan to season our pan. You’ll do the same thing when cooking fried rice. And what it does is basically just season your pan so that nothing sticks. Swirl this oil carefully and let things heat up until it is smoking. And once that happens, pour off that oil. Now, with a splash of new oil, we’re actually ready to cook. Be ready with all your ingredients very close by, cuz this is going to happen fast. First, cook your shrimp. Hit them with a quick pinch of salt. And the goal here is to let them crisp up and nothing more. See how I’m already getting those beautiful crispy golden brown sides. This is all we’re looking for here. We don’t want to overcook the shrimp. These literally just need seconds. Just remove them from the pan back into a bowl because they’re going to sit off to the side while we finish making the rest of the pad thai. Now, aromatics. First, those shallots, then garlic, then our dried shrimp, daicon radish, a few chili flakes, depending on how spicy you want it, as well as our tofu, and then move quickly. And remember, you’re not trying to break the tofu. We still want these in nice, perfect squares. For this step here, stir for about 2 to 3 minutes, depending on how hot your pan is. And once your garlic and shallots have become golden brown and everything is fragrant, grab your soaked noodles. drain those off and toss them in right away. I’m also going to pour over half of my sauce and then mix. You’ll want to cook the noodles until there’s really not much moisture left at the bottom. Most of the sauce should either soak up in the noodles or actually coat them. So, this here means we’re not ready yet. Once there’s no longer any sauce clinging to the bottom of the walk, we are ready to move on. Which means I’ll move my noodles off to the side. This is going to make some room for our eggs. And then crack in two eggs and quickly scramble those up and then cover them with my noodles. Just let this sit for a moment. What we’re doing is basically just creating a noodle seal over the eggs where they sort of steam and get nice and fluffy while also getting crispy on the bottom of the walk. Let this go for about 45 seconds. Making sure you have a nice solid seal over the eggs. Give those eggs a quick little mix. See how we got those beautiful crispy bits on the bottom here? They’re nice and golden brown. Chop them up. Then mix those in with the noodles. Then add back in the shrimp. Shake it all around. Toss everything together. And this is the final step where if things feel a little bit too dry, you can go ahead with just one more little splash of sauce or water and then we’ll cut the heat. Now, while the heat’s off, for this final step, I’ll add about 90% of my bean sprouts as well as 90% of my garlic chives and about half of my peanuts and give this a gentle stir to really mix things in and start to wilt some of those veggies. To plate my pad thai, I’m going to lay down a banana leaf. Then lay down my hot steaming pad thai. Then I’ll finish it off with a few garlic chives. These can be really nice to add some texture into the dish. Then an extra sprinkle of some of those peanuts. And you cannot forget some very, very fresh lime. Believe it or not, you’re not supposed to eat pad thai with chopsticks. Instead, what you’ll do is you’ll scoop things into that spoon with your fork and then you’ll lift and then you eat. M. This is so much better than take out. [Music]