Pad Thai | Simple No-Wok Recipe, Cooks In 3 Minutes

I think I 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 to dilute 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 little 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 there that you can set aside and use as a raw garnish. The rest will go into my aromatics bowl. Fresh ginger — a little thumb-sized piece. Slice off the skin and chop it up. A roughly equal amount of garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped. Don't go too fine in the garlic or it'll be liable to burn here. In the aromatics bowl with that. And then I'm gonna 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 them 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-sized 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 put these into 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. Fetch is a free app that you download on your phone, and whenever you shop for anything — food, clothes, anything — you just use the app to take pictures of your receipt, then you hit submit. You instantly get reward points back. For online shopping, it's even easier. You hit that e-button and it scans your email inbox for eligible e-receipts. 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 reward button and exchange your points for savings — gift cards at almost any kind of store that you can think of. I'm trading mine in for $10 off Nintendo Online, but you could even trade your points for Visa gift cards. 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 non-stick 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. Little pinch of salt in 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, 2 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 the 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 or 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 on a non-stick 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 am 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 in the pan and keep them there. So I've pushed everything over to one side of the pan, and the chicken still should 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 all of 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 parboiled noodles, and there they go. They'll finish cooking 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, and 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 bit of 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. And 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 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 pieces 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 my favorite Thai place where I live just closed, I am very happy to have cracked this nut to my own satisfaction.