How to Make Authentic Pad Thai in 5 Mins! + Pad Thai Sauce Recipe

Sawaddee ka, welcome to Pad Thai Kitchen. So if you've ever made pad thai at home before, you probably realize it's not the quickest thing to make. There's a lot of ingredients to prep. But today I'm gonna show you how you can prepare yourself so that comes Tuesday night, you can have pad thai for the family in less than 30 minutes or even 10 minutes if you do your homework right. All right, let's get started. So depending on how fast you want the actual cooking to go, there are different levels of preparedness. But the one non-negotiable thing that you have to have in advance is the sauce. And I'm actually gonna show you how to make a sauce in bulk in a large volume so you'll have it for eight servings, all right? Starting with a pot. So I'm going to saute our garlic and shallots in some oil. And this will cut down quite a bit of time because we're not sauteing garlic and shallots on the day. Lots of shallots going in. I forgot to chop the garlic. So while this is going on low heat, I'm gonna chop the garlic, which you should do before. Part of the lesson here is to make sure you're prepared before you start cooking, which is exactly what we are not doing. Into the pot. Now I'm just gonna let this cook until it's nice and soft and translucent. You can get a little bit of caramelization on the shallots if you like. And this will take about five to eight minutes because it's a lot of stuff going on here, but this is going to save you time on the day. Okay, so now I'm wilted and translucent. Well, not me, the shallots. And I'm gonna just take this out of the pot for now and get most things out. Okay, I'm returning this to the stove and palm sugar's going in first. Don't worry about all the brown bits. That's all good caramelized flavor. And I'm going to let this dissolve. And if you want, you can let it caramelize a little bit for a richer flavor. And I'm just scraping the bottom of the pot as I go because there was some bits of garlic and shallots stuck. And I'm gonna keep the heat on sort of medium, medium-low just so it doesn't caramelize too quickly and catch me off guard. Nice. So you see how my sugar is starting to brown in certain spots. It's not all melted. That's okay, but I'm getting some caramelization of the sugar. I don't want to push it too far and get a burnt flavor. So I'm actually happy with this. I'm gonna stop the cooking by turning off the heat and then goes in with tamarind. Woo-hoo! Totally normal. Don't panic. It'll settle itself down. Okay. Now that it's settled and I just turned it off so it's not so aggressive, I'm gonna turn the heat back on to help the rest of the sugar dissolve and now go in with my fish sauce. And the reason I go in with the tamarind paste first before the fish sauce, if you fat the fish sauce first, it'll just perfume the room with fish sauce evaporation. A note about tamarind. There is a range. I'm gonna give you in the recipe. You might need a cup. You might need three quarters of a cup because every tamarind, every brand, every batch, you make it yourself or you buy it, they vary significantly in how sour it is. So what I would suggest you do is give it a taste and if it makes you pucker, three quarters of a cup is probably fine. If it doesn't, add a little bit more. You can always err on the side of less and add to your final dish to be safe. Now at this point, I'm just gonna wait until most of the sugar is dissolved. Don't worry about all. It'll eventually dissolve. Okay, so I'm pretty much there. I'm gonna add my shallots and garlic back in and that's pretty much it. That's our sauce. The absolutely most important thing that you wanna do is you wanna measure the volume of this sauce. You wanna get a volume so that you know how much sauce you need per serving because depending on how much garlic or shallots you add, how much tamarind you add, you're gonna end up with a little bit of a different volume, right? This is for eight servings. So we're gonna measure and divide by eight, exactly two cups. And then very important is you're gonna tape on your container. Quarter of a cup of sauce per serving. That's very important because you will not remember when you go to cook it and then also add on that note, add one and a half tablespoons of water per serving and that's it. That's our sauce. That alone will save you a ton of time. So you've got the sauce. You're now at level one of the preparedness scale. To take it up to level two, you wanna have your noodles soaked in advance because in room temp, the noodles take about an hour but what you can do is let them soak, take them out, drain them and then put them in the container in the fridge and they'll last like that for at least three days. Probably four is okay. I've never gone that far but it can be something you do on the weekend and you have it for the week. If you want some emergency noodle soaking, check out the blog. I'll write more details on it. Level three of preparedness. You wanna have your protein cooked in advance. So today we're doing shrimp but it can be chicken, it can be tofu, it can be pork, whatever you want and you can just have it cooked, put it in the Tupperware and you can add that to anything. You don't have to add it to pad thai. This is just a generally useful sort of ready to go protein and by the way, restaurants do all of this. That's why they can have your pad thai ready in less than 10 minutes. Now, if you really wanna be level four, like restaurant level preparedness, you wanna have all your vegetables cut and ready to go and talk about the garlic chives and they will be fine cut for a few days, two, three days, they'll be totally fine. Bean sprouts, hey, they're already cut. Good news. You can chop your peanuts if you want. You can have your tofu already cut if you want. I mean, this doesn't take too long but then again, it depends how fast you want the dish done at the end of the day, right? Just with the tofu, if you do cut it in advance, keep it in water. It'll keep them moist and in good condition. All right, so now I'm at level four. Let me show you how fast this goes in real time. I'm gonna start my timer just to see how fast this takes, how long this takes. Walks a little gunky from the shrimp. One benefit of not cooking your protein days ahead is you can have the flavor still in the pot, the pan. Okay. First thing going in, the dried shrimp and the preserved radish, sweet preserved radish, which completely optional. If you don't have it, don't stress over it. And if you're wondering why don't I just add all this stuff into the sauce itself? There is a reason. Check out my blog post. I'll explain all that in detail. So get all this hot. And now the noodle goes in. Our sauce goes in. And don't forget the water. The water goes in. Which reminds me, I need a little bit more water. And a little more sauce because I was operating on one portion but there's actually two in here. No problem. One more portion of sauce. Okay. I kept thinking quarter cup, quarter cup, but I'm making two. Let this cook until all the sauce is absorbed. And this is the exact same recipe as my crab Thai video. Nothing new here, but we're doing the fast version of it. I am going to repeat myself again. You don't want to cook really much more than this per batch. Two portions. With this size wok, you can probably get away with three, but any more than that, you're going to end up with noodles just boiling in the liquid. And that's how you get soggy noodles. So another reason to have everything prepped in advance so that if you have a lot of people to feed, you're not taking so long in the cooking part itself. Noodles are almost dry. Once it's dry, the egg comes in. I'm going to push it to one side. Can add a little bit more oil to the space. Break the yolk. And then I'm going to move the noodles back on top. Just let it sit for a bit. Because you kind of want like an omelet at the bottom. Okay. Now you get some nice browning, deep browning of egg. That's good. Give that a toss. Okay. We're pretty much home stretch here. I'm going to turn off the heat. See? 355, off the heat. Now the vegetables go in. We've got garlic chives, bean sprouts, peanuts. Looks like a lot, but that is mistake number one that most people make is they don't add enough bean sprouts. And that's how you get heavy, gloopy pad thai. This is what's going to make it fresh and light and delicious. See? And it all welds. Beautiful. Don't forget the shrimp. Whee! And toss it in. And that is it. See? Four minutes, 35 seconds. And you got beautiful pad thai for two. All right. Woo! And by the way, another reason it's really good to do pad thai prep is because it doesn't keep well. This is not a dish you want to save, like make today and eat tomorrow. It's not good. So whenever possible, you want to have it fresh. Classic garnish. Even more bean sprouts. Some extra garlic chives. And these are all super classic way you see pad thai served in Thailand. A wedge of lime. Missing something. Peanuts! Yeah! There's already some in there, but always good to have some nice fresh lime. Look at that! You just did that in less than five minutes. Plus all the prep time that you didn't do today. Let's give it a taste. Mistake number two is people don't put lime on their pad thai. It really makes a difference. Adds that fresh brightness. Mmm! So good! I should add too, that none of this advanced prep stuff compromised the flavor at all. Like we're not taking shortcuts or anything. Like this still tastes exactly as it should. A good balance of sweet, salty, sour. Again, be prepared to adjust the sour depending on your tamarind. But man, this right here, I need some chili flakes. Make it a little spicy. So good. So I hope you give this a try. Level one, two, three, four, pick your level depending on how rushed you are during the week. And I promise you this will pay off. A special thanks to our Patreon members who support the show. If you wanna know what that's all about, you can watch my videos ad free. You can check out the link in the description below. Thank you as always for watching and I will see you next time for your next delicious time.