How to Make Pad Thai with Jet Tila _ Ready Jet Cook With Jet Tila _ Food Network

Hey guys, I'm Jet Tila and this is Ready Jet Cook, where I take the mystery out of Asian markets by showing you how to make some of my favorite Asian dishes from shop to cook. But before I get into today's recipes, make sure to subscribe. My family popularized Pad Thai in America over 40 years ago when we opened the first Thai restaurant. So it's super cool to be sharing our recipe all while shopping here at my family's Thai market in Hollywood. Let's get started. So instead of green onions, I'm gonna pick up some garlic chives. I love them because they really smell and taste like a cross between onions and garlic, and it's actually a traditional nod to old school Pad Thai. So it's time for baked tofu. This is great for wok cooking because it doesn't fall apart. It's also pre-marinated in a little soy sauce, so I love this for Pad Thai. This is not the stuff in water that breaks up. Don't use this for the wok. Use the baked tofu. Tamarind is an essential flavoring for Pad Thai. Instead of using the whole fruit, which can be cumbersome, go for the liquid tamarind. It might say tamarind concentrate or liquid tamarind on the bottle. It's correct, especially if it's from Thailand. So before I check out, I wanted to get some banana leaves. I'm gonna use it as a really great plating implement, but traditionally, they've steamed food in it, they cook food with it. It's a very cool way to make your Pad Thai look awesome. All right, mom, you know what we're making? Can you guess by my ingredients? Um, Pad Thai. Pad Thai, very good. Excellent. Do you know how to use this machine? Have you not been on the cashier long enough? Who taught you how to make Pad Thai? Truth, don't do TV talk, real talk. No, no, I mean, you. That's right, see, there you go. I got it on film, exactly right. Oh man, can we get another cashier here? This is really, I'm just kidding, it's taking forever. Basically, for the price of going out to eat Pad Thai, I'm stocking my pantry. So if you get a little bit of sticker shock here, don't worry, you're building your Asian pantry as you go, and you're gonna be able to use these ingredients to make just about everything. All right, guys, so we're back from the store. It's time to get prepped for our Pad Thai. The first thing we need to really do is soak these noodles. Don't ever boil these noodles. Very simply, soak them in warm water, and warm water means warm bath water. So you're like, oh, that feels comfortable. I'd take a bath in that water. That's the right temperature. The noodles actually have to go through like three steps of cooking. This step is soaking to reconstitute. The next will be frying in the pan, and then the sauce goes in, and they absorb all the sauce. Super simple. So I got the noodles soaking. Let's move on to more Pad Thai prep. The next thing I'm gonna cut is the savory tofu. So like any other protein, I just wanna cut this into a nice, thin plank. So half first, and then line up both halves and cut them into thin little planks. As long as they're even, and you can pick them up with a chopstick, they are a good size. So next, I'm gonna do garlic chives. Now, you just wanna simply cut them into about two-inch lengths on a bias, meaning instead of perpendicular, angle the knife, boop. There you go, just like that. Super simple. If you can't find garlic chives, don't freak out. Just use scallions. All right, those are done, and always garlic. Just smash, smash, smash, and then rough chop. You don't wanna mince these too fine because you don't want really fine garlic playing with 400-degree oil because that's instant garlic charcoal. No bueno. So finally, I'm gonna show you a cool peanut trick. These are roasted peanuts, not salted. You can do the knife, but why knife it when you have a saucepan? And you're just simply just gonna lean. Lean and press using the edge of a saucepan, and you get these kind of fun, uneven, big, chunky shapes. And I'm not looking for absolute uniform peanuts because I want that kind of texture variance when I eat this. Boom, super easy. Peanuts are chopped. Now, let's get to that banana leaf we bought at the store. These are actually really cool. They basically come right off the banana tree, and they're giant. We're just gonna use them as a little plate garnish, and I'm gonna show you what I mean. So I'm grabbing a little bowl kind of as a stencil. I know Anne Burrell gets really mad at me for doing this, but it's the only way to get the leverage that I need to punch out this circle. So I'm following the lines of the bowl. One way, I'm gonna come around the other way, and it's even, steady pressure. Now, holding this down, lifting away the banana leaf, and hopefully I've done my job. And voila, perfect little circles. Aw, there you go, boom. This is done. Let me move on to protein and sauce, and we're ready to cook. Thai people believe in balancing five flavors, hot, sour, salty, sweet, and savory, also known as the yum. All that word means is the balance of hot, sour, salty, and sweet. First ingredient, fish sauce. It's salt and savoriness. After that, a little bit of vinegar. But we're actually gonna use three kinds of sour. Vinegar was one, lime juice, and tamarind. Now, as we know, tamarind is a fruit that grows around the equator. It has a nice sour and sweet flavor. All right, three sours in. Now, we have to balance the salty and the sour with a little sweet, and that's just gonna be sugar. So for heat, traditionally, pad thai in Thailand is made with sriracha. Now, it's delicious, but if you're serving people who don't like heat, paprika is the perfect balancing point. Paprika, as we know, adds a lot of color because it is a pepper, but it's not too spicy. I like using both for this dish. So I'm just gonna bring all these flavors together. You wanna stir this up until the sugar dissolves. I mean, that's it. It's a lot of ingredients, but balanced together, they make a really phenomenal flavor. I just need to cut my protein, and we're in the pan. For this dish, I'm gonna be using chicken thigh. I think chicken thigh is nice and moist. It doesn't really dry out. I just want you to cut these into nice, thin strips. So kind of cut large pieces in half first. Find that grain, and then cut the chicken thigh into thin strips against the grain. Really just looking for even kind of bite-sized pieces when using chicken thighs. I'm gonna clean this down, wash my hands, and let's get cooking. I'm using a short enamelized cast iron pan, which is gonna hold heat amazingly. Always high temp oil, getting this pan very hot. And I can see the oil kind of shimmering, and little wisps of white smoke starting. So I am starting with the dried shrimp, the garlic, the tofu. I'm just gonna saute these up until they start to blend their flavors to the dish. Now it's time for chicken. I wanna get this chicken seared on the outside, but still nice and rare in the middle, because there's a lot more to cook. When using eggs with noodles or rice, here's a cool technique. I want you to push all of the hot stuff in the pan against one side, pull up a little bit of oil on that open area, and we're gonna crack our eggs right into there. Don't scramble them yet. Let them kind of set and cook up, white separated from yolks. And once they start to fry up a little bit, then you can kind of bring all the items together. With the eggs not cooked through yet, I wanna pull the noodles right out of that water. And check it out, just in a little bit of time, the noodles have gone from firm to nice and soft. And you want all that extra moisture in the pan to help create steam. So I've judged a ton of food TV, and most people get in most trouble with these noodles. They end up boiling them, and then trying to stir fry them again. That is not the right way to go. You wanna soak like we did, and then get them into the pan. And that's how you get that beautiful, kind of slippery, chewy texture that this pad thai noodle has. And if you end up over soaking them, or do make the mistake of boiling them, just start over, get a new batch. They're super cheap. So the noodles look soft and cooked down. I'm gonna make a little nice area for the shrimp to be able to cook through. Let's get that shrimp to the bottom so all that heat can start cooking them through. And I'm also gonna throw in that pickled daikon right now. So this is just pickled daikon radish, the white radish. Instead of being sour pickled, like a lot of the Japanese or Korean, this is very sweet. So it's got a very bold sweet and slightly sour flavor. Don't be scared to really kind of work all the ingredients in the pan. Scraping is totally okay, because you wanna scrape the bits up before they start to burn. All right, so my shrimp are about halfway. It's time to add the sauce. So the sauce is actually gonna start to boil immediately. That's gonna create some steam. It's actually gonna deglaze the pan and get all those delicious bits up to the top. And I really wanna just work the noodles and all of the ingredients together to really soak up all those five flavors. Here's a really fun trick to kind of cooking up the vegetables. I'm gonna make a bed, right, by kind of really laying everything out evenly. And I'm gonna add half my green sprouts, because I wanna leave some for plating. Some peanuts, leave some again for plating. And those garlic chives. And I want indirect heat here. I want to be able to steam these vegetables so they can kind of impart their flavors and not singe them. So I'm just tucking them in, reading them a story. It's time to put them to bed. Let them steam up for a few seconds before you plate this dish up. So heat's going off. I'm constantly kind of visually checking how much moisture's in this pan, because pad thai should be moist, not dry, but it shouldn't be wet. So if I pull up the pad thai and it's dripping sauce, it's too wet. If it's too wet, just let it reduce a little longer. On the other side, if it's a little too dry, you can use the pasta water trick, meaning that soaking water can be added in there to just kind of hydrate the noodles a little more. So I'm gonna lay the banana leaf right in the middle, kind of like how they plate it if you're eating this in the streets of Bangkok. Just lay my pad thai down right in the middle. And you always want to put the goodies at the top, right? I mean, everyone wants to see the nice shrimp and tofu right on top, so I like to arrange them kind of right around. Bring this over here, do some final garnishes, a little lime, some of the bean sprouts, and then some of my reserve peanuts. Starving, just looking at this is making me hungry. So there it is, the Tila Family Pad Thai recipe since 1972, believe it or not. Mm, really one of my favorite dishes. Now it's your turn, go forth, cook pad thai, subscribe, like, let us know how it's going, and come back for another episode of Ready Jet Cook.