4 Thai Street Food Recipes You Can Master At Home | Marion’s Kitchen #Loveasianfood

If I could be doing anything in the world right now, it would be sitting street-side in Bangkok eating Thai street food. There's always something delicious to eat. I have so many different favourites. I wanted to collect them all into the one video for you. So what are we starting with? Yentafo, Thai pink noodle soup. My other favourite is garlic prawn pad see eel. Thai railway fried rice might be not something you've heard of before, but you definitely need to know how to cook. And finally, Chiang Mai noodle soup. One of the things that's scary about trying to make like street food style noodle soup at home is that it kind of looks complicated. But I'm going to break it all down for you. So at the end of this video, you are going to be making street food noodle soup like a pro. One of the first things you might have asked yourself is why is it pink? There's a few reasons why it's pink. Let's start off with the chilies. First of all, I'm using large and small, mild and hot to get a good balance of flavour. Now I'm going to use Thai sriracha sauce because that's the original and the best. I love rooster as well. It's just that for this particular soup, you want the tanginess and the tartness of a Thai sriracha sauce. Add some tomato ketchup. And then here we go again with the red things. This is red fermented bean curd. You want the bean curd itself and you want that red bean curd-y sauce. This is widely available in Asian grocery stores or search it out online. Add some fresh garlic cloves and pickled garlic. Peel off the little cloves, pop those in and you want some of the pickled garlic juice as well. This is all the tangy flavour that you're going to love. Add some white vinegar and some sugar and blend. Wow, look at that colour! It's such a happy colour. We're not finished yet though. We just need to pop that into a saucepan. Heat that up and let it simmer for 5 or 10 minutes just to let all those flavours make friends in there. And that is your Yentafo sauce. The broth for any Asian noodle soup is really important. I'm going to show you this really great trick which I stole from my mum of turning water into the most amazing stock with the most simple ingredients. We're actually going to start off with some pork mince. Typically my mum would use pork bones here but they were really expensive in my supermarket this morning. So we're going to do this pork ball method which is also amazing. Add some fish sauce, white pepper, mix it. The Asian mumma trick here is slap that pork around. I don't know, it sounds rude but it's what you need to do to get the right texture. We are now making meatballs and broth in here. As that pork cooks in that water, the water is going to be beautifully flavoured by the fish sauce and the pork and the pepper. The pork balls just need to simmer for around about 10 minutes. Take them out with a slotted spoon and you've got the start of a really great pork broth here but we need to add some extra things. I'm going to take some coriander and I just need the root end of the coriander. Chop that roughly, pop it into my mortar, add some garlic and some pepper and give that a pound. This is what's called Sam Gler in Thai. It's a 3 flavour paste and it is magical. Makes everything taste really good. Spoon it out into your broth. The other really traditional ingredient to add to a Thai pork broth like this is daikon. I couldn't find daikon at my supermarket this morning so I'm going to replace it with turnip. If you can't find daikon, turnip is a great alternative. Trim, peel, slice into your broth. Add in soy sauce and sugar and that just needs to simmer for another 20 minutes. Just all drama happening here. Now strain your broth. This is what you should be looking at right now. I mean it's perfectly golden and beautiful. I'm congratulating myself right now, I'm so happy. So we have broth, we have Yentafo sauce. There are some other very essential, I'm loathe to call them garnishes but they're garnishes. But they really do make the soup. Take some wonton wrappers and fry them in some oil until they're nice and crispy. The other necessity here is garlic oil. You will not find a noodle soup joint in Thailand that doesn't have garlic oil. Just add some chopped garlic to some hot oil, sizzle until golden, pour that out into a bowl and it's as simple as that. Now we're cooking noodles. I'm using these wide rice noodles. Into some boiling water, straight into your serving bowl. Now here's a really nice selection of the kinds of things you would get at a street cart to put in your Yentafo soup. I always like to go with the puff tofu. There's various types of fish cakes and fish balls here. I've got some prawns too. Just heat that through in the boiling water. When the prawns are cooked, put all of that into your bowl as well. The traditional vegetable here is pak boong. That's what we call it in Thai. It's also known as water spinach or kangkong. You just need to trim the ends and then cut the stems into batons. We sort of mainly use the stems for this soup. So you can use the leaves for a stir fry. Pop that into boiling water and then again into your bowl. And then here comes the magic part. Okay, your Yentafo sauce goes on top. Hot soup on top of that. You can turn it magically pink. Final little touches. Our crispy wonton and garlic oil. Lots of those little crispy bits of garlic too. All right, let's get in here. Have a look at the colour of this broth. Oh, so good. Oh, this is why you need to be making this little soup at home. It's like no other flavour. It's porky and salty, but it has like this funky tang to it. Ah, I really love it. I love it so much. Patsy eel literally just translates as soy sauce stir fry. So for me, this is like one of those dishes that really tests you as a cook because there's nowhere to hide. It should be very simple, really great technique and really good flavours. So let's get started on the prawn part first of all, because this is not so traditional, but I really want to like garlic up my prawns. I want like a nice hit of garlic business going on. So I'm going to do my prawns with the grated garlic. Typically you kind of stir fry the chopped garlic with the vegetables and the noodles and stuff, but I really like kind of like trying to infuse the protein with some of that garlic flavour. And some soy sauce here too, sesame oil and some pepper, white pepper here. So I think for me, patsy eel, like a really good one, it's all about the little details. Like you should have the really smoky soy sauce fried noodles, a little bit charry, but then you also need to have a good hit of white pepper, both on your protein and at the end. Now let's talk about noodles. So I've got these rice noodles, fresh rice noodles that I got from my Asian grocery store. They're usually found in the fridge section, but do you know a little secret? You can take them home and freeze them actually. So I like to keep a packet in my freezer all the time so that I can use them all the time. But the thing is that when they come out of the packet, they're kind of really firm. And if you try to break them up or try to strip them out, they kind of crumble into little bits because they're really firm, I guess because they're a little cold. So the trick here is that you want to heat them up a little so they're nice and warm and they'll easily come apart and separate without breaking. So I usually do this in the microwave, because it's really easy. Alright, so now these guys should come apart very easily. So much easier. Now before we start stir frying, there's just a couple of other bits and pieces that we need to do. Now I mentioned condiments earlier and I think this is another really key thing that people often get wrong with a pad see eel. You really need this hit of chili vinegar at the end. That's what I'm about to make. So just some slices of chili and some white vinegar and this is literally the condiment you get on the street when you're ordering your pad see eel in Bangkok and some chili powder as well is definitely... It's an optional, but it's a definite for me. So now for my green vegetables. Now, if I'm in Thailand, I use a green vegetable called Kana. It's very easy to find, very common. It's quite similar to bok choy, but a little bit firmer. So when I'm outside of Thailand, I'll typically use bok choy, pak choy, or some broccolini, which I'm using today. I do quite like the broccolini because it's got a little bit more of a firmer texture. It's not as watery as a bok choy, but I do like to slice it just on the diagonal so it cooks a little bit quicker in the wok. Okay, a few more things. I just want to get some eggs ready. So all of this is going to happen fairly quickly, not as quickly as it would in like a street cart situation where the wok is really hot and the fire is really hot. Always at home, it takes a little bit longer with stir-frying because you want to let that wok come up to temperature. And I'm always talking about how like, you know, that kind of really fast wok cooking is kind of for the movies only. Unless you have a really powerful burner at home, which most people don't, even me. So I'm going to let that heat up and I'm going to pour some oil in there. And now this first part is all about the noodles. So the aim here is to get really smoky, charred wok fried noodles. And to do that, we just go in with our separated noodles and then just a little dark soy sauce here. And give us the color that we want. And a little dash of sugar is going to help with that kind of burning caramelization. A little bit of char, that's what I'm after. Now you just want to stir fry these until they're soft, pliable, and then just starting to burn at the edges. If you go too long, you'll get a big sticky clumpy mess in there. This is looking pretty good though. So I'm going to take these out. A little bit more oil here. Again, let it come up to temperature, get nice and hot. Now go in with your prawns. Spread them out and let them get a nice sear on them. You see, so this is kind of what I'm talking about. Like with domestic wok cooking, you're really waiting for that temperature all the time. The second I add the prawns, the wok temperature goes down. I need to wait for it to come back up. Of course, if you're in a Chinese restaurant and you've got that really high heat, you can just be there with the flames and the drama and all the things, but you have to do things a little differently at home to get the same results. I'm stir frying these now and I've already got a really nice color on the bottom of those prawns. Garlic and the prawns smell so good together. So my prawns are almost cooked through. I'm going to now add in my broccolini. Now here's the thing with the broccolini, because it does have quite firm stems, you want to add just a touch of water to help kind of steam and cook the broccolini through. So just a little bit in the center there, like a couple of tablespoons. See that steam? Now we've got really beautiful, bright steamed broccolini happening in there. Now just as my broccolini is nice and tender, I'm going to push everything over to the side and add in my egg. And then you just kind of want to push the egg out just to get it to cook a little more evenly. Once that egg is like at kind of a soft set, then you can start flipping it, tossing it through everything else. Now we can go in with our noodles and a little drizzle of regular soy sauce, just around the side of the wok so that the soy sauce reaches those prawns underneath. A little bit of white pepper again, and then toss everything together. And at this point now, we really have a patsy eel going on. Now this is the kind of dish that will not wait for any woman. You need to get it straight out onto a plate, final bits and pieces. Chili vinegar, chili powder. And there we go, guys. That is a very classic technique for Thai patsy eel with a little beefed up garlic prawns in there. But let me show you how we go about eating this the right way. Chili vinegar everywhere. Chili powder also everywhere. And then in there, nice big noodley bit. It seems so simple, like when you look at it, it looks like a very simple wok-tossed noodle. But the flavours, you know, you've got the beautiful charriness on the noodles. I mean, just kind of like a really ultra comforting garlicky prawn kind of flavour. And that vinegar makes all the difference. So good. Yum. Sometimes the simplest things really are the most joyous. This fried rice is made with some humble ingredients, but with a little bit of technique, we are going to make it epic. This is my Thai railway, I'll tell you about that later, fried rice. So story has it, this fried rice was served and sold on the railways of Thailand and probably still is. But the point is, I think in that kind of environment had to be sort of simple ingredients and quite cheap ingredients as well. So this one is budget-friendly and very simple everyday ingredients, but I'm going to show you how to get the best out of them. So let's get started first of all with the tomato. Now I know not everyone would think of tomato as a fried rice or a stir-fry kind of vegetable or fruit. Technically it's a fruit, I think. But in Thailand, we often use tomato in our fried rice and I really like it. So what you want are some nice little wedges. And the cool thing about the tomato is it's actually adding that kind of umami savouriness. I know you guys hear me talk about that all the time, but tomatoes have a natural amount of glutamates that add that extra savoury flavour. So there is method to the madness here. Now the other thing I'm going to do is get some eggs prepped. I really like an eggy fried rice, I'm into that. So I'm going to go with three eggs. Now you want to get your wok or your pan really hot here. So earlier I was talking about how we're going to use a bit of technique to get the very best out of our simple ingredients. So very, very hot is the first thing. Like I want to be able to make this like scary hot. You should be able to see a little smoke happening. Once that happens, then we can add in our oil. Now in with the garlic. So with the garlic, chop it nice and rough so it doesn't burn the second it hits the oil. Another little tip there. And some onion. Now the reason we want to get that pan so hot is that, you know how like in the movies or when you're watching a fancy chef documentary or something on Netflix, you see the wok happening really fast and there's fire and everything's happening so quickly, but they're actually in a restaurant with a really high sort of powerful burner underneath. At home, it's just not the same. So you really kind of do need to adjust a little bit your cooking method. It's not the movies. So I like to give the ingredients a lot of time with the heat so that we get a little bit of that like smoky charriness, which you want for a fried rice. I love the smell of onion and garlic in a wok. Simple things make me so happy. So the onion's just starting to soften. I'm going to get my tomatoes in there. And what I want here is again, to leave the tomatoes to get a little bit of that kind of cooked sort of thing happening, getting into the heat. And that way we're getting more of the flavor developing. So leave them in there till they soften up a little bit. And give them a toss every now and then. Okay, tomatoes looking a little softer, broken down a little bit. So now I'm going to add in my cabbage. I did say very simple ingredients here, humble ingredients. You could use cabbage. You could use some Chinese broccoli. You could use regular broccoli, whatever you like. Now just toss that around until you just kind of see that green color pop. Don't want the cabbage to get too wilty. Now I'm going to go in with my rice. Let's talk about rice for a little bit. This is rice that I made yesterday. If you want to watch a video on exactly how to make the perfect rice for fried rice, I have one of those on my channel for you. So get in there. But basically you want the rice to be really nice and dry, not gluggy, slightly undercooked. And that means we're just going to get a better texture for the fried rice. Okay, so that goes in. Now I want to go in with some fish sauce, of course, because we're talking Thai fried rice here. And now some regular light soy sauce. Light soy sauce just being, you know, your everyday Chinese soy sauce. And now the dark soy sauce. So this is like the key characteristic to this railway fried rice. It's the color and that little bit of sweetness. I love this part where the rice gets all like coated and basically just turns into something really burnished and beautiful. You want to make sure that each grain gets its share of that kind of seasoning love. Now, another little secret ingredient here, and this one comes directly from my mom, and that is a little sprinkling of sugar. So we're not making things sweet here. We're just adding another little element that's going to help to like caramelize and get that kind of deep, almost smoky flavor in the wok. This is looking good. What I need to do now is do my eggs. So sort of push everything to the side and you want to add in a little bit more oil on this empty side. And then in go the eggs. Now, what I do here is kind of like tilt the pan a little bit so more of the egg part is on the heat and then just kind of push them around, bully them around a little in the pan there and get them starting to set. Okay, so once that egg is looking sort of like almost set, I kind of get in there and start flipping it over. I like to keep my egg kind of chunky. I like to see the bits of egg in there. So I'm just going to leave it like that and then just start tossing everything together. Okay, by now things should be smelling incredibly beautiful and fried rice-y. Is that even a smell? I'm sure that's a smell. That is definitely a specific fried rice smell. Now, another little key kind of secret ingredient, well, if you're Thai, it's not so secret, but white pepper. We love to put a lot of white pepper on our fried rice. So go in there with a really decent pinch. It just kind of has a more delicate aroma, pepper kind of aroma and flavour than black pepper. And now for some final like pop of freshness, I want some coriander and spring onion. Now, to sprinkle most of that on top, I'm going to leave a little bit for some garnish at the end. Now, this is the kind of fried rice my mum would love. Quite old school with the tomato and the simple ingredients. So good. Okay, let's get this out. Now, the other thing with Thai fried rice is that for me, it's the final little bits of zhuzhing that really make everything pop and amazing. So you've got to get some prik nam pla. This is what we call prik nam pla. And it is some very spicy chillies, some fish sauce. You can optionally put a little squeeze of lime or lemon. I like to put a little squeeze in there. And then we always have cucumber because the cucumber kind of cools down the palate as you're eating your fried rice. And depending on how much chilli you're putting on there, obviously in between the spicy mouthfuls. Now, I like to have a bit of a decorative cucumber for this one. I mean, you know, we're talking old school here. So I like to get the julienne peeler out and have nice little sort of edges. And then a little lemon or lime wedge. And a final little sprinkling of some greenery. And there you go guys, a very old school style of fried rice, Thai railway fried rice. Let's get in here and see how we've gone. I'm gonna squeeze of that lemon. I want a very generous amount of that chilli, you know me. This has all the things. So you get the... Wow, that chilli is punchy. You get the chilli, you get the tangy lemon, and then you get that like savoury fried rice and the egg and the tomato. And just a little hint of the pepper. That is technically perfect. And just delicious. Yum. Beautifully spiced, coconut-based chicken broth, crispy noodles on top. That's right guys, this is Chiang Mai's classic Khao Soi noodle soup. I'm gonna start off by making the paste first. We're gonna make sort of like a curry paste. We're gonna start with some dried red chillies. And I've just had these soaking in some hot water for about 15, 20 minutes. And then slice them up. Now this chilli soaking liquid, don't throw that away because if we get a little stuck in our blender further down the track, we're gonna need some of that water. Okay, chillies go in. Next up are the red Asian shallots and some garlic and lemongrass. Just give that a bruise with the back of your knife. Peel away that outer layer, that can be a little tough. Now finely slice that. And some galangal. So galangal kind of looks like ginger, but not the same. Has a much more high citrusy, floral, pine forest kind of aroma to it. Try and find it at your Asian grocer. And you just need to peel it and then chop it up. And next up we have kaffir lime leaves. So these guys add such a beautiful fragrance and aroma and flavor. So you just need to peel the stem out. And it's easier to roll these guys up for slicing. And now we're getting into the spice realm. We're gonna start off with some ground cumin and some ground coriander and then a healthy dose of turmeric. And then finally we want our salty element. So I'm using a Thai shrimp paste and this is gonna add both, not just saltiness, but also an umami or a savory background flavor. It does have a very strong smell. I would recommend not smelling it, just using it. And then a little pinch of salt. Now just blend this to a smooth paste. So you can see here that I've kind of just got my blender chopping the ingredients. I can't really see a wet paste yet. It's very dry. So I'm gonna add in some of that chili liquid. You just wanna do this a couple of spoonfuls at a time because I don't want it too wet. Okay, let's have a look. Ah, that's what we want. So you can see we've got a fairly smooth paste here. I don't mind a few little chunks of chili in there. I think that makes the final dish seem a little bit more rustic and more homemade. And this recipe makes twice as much curry paste as you're gonna need. So keep the rest of it in the freezer for another day. Now we get started on that all amazing broth. All right, I want a little bit of oil in my pan and some of our curry paste. The smell as soon as that hits the oil is so beautiful. Now the idea here is that we wanna soften up all of those raw aromatics that we have in our paste. So give this a good couple of minutes to really develop some flavor. Paste is smelling amazing. Time to add in the chicken and I'm using chicken thighs. So traditionally, if you were eating this in Chiang Mai, generally it would be a chicken drumstick. I find that it kind of gets a bit messy trying to eat the noodle and drumstick. So I like to do chicken thigh when I'm doing it at home. Just let that chicken kind of develop a little bit of flavor and color in there. Now we're gonna add in some coconut milk and then some chicken stock as well. And now we're gonna do a little bit of seasoning now and a little bit of seasoning after we've simmered the soup. And to do that, I need some palm sugar. Just need to shake that with your knife. And then some fish sauce. And then just a little dash of dark sweet soy sauce. This is gonna give us a little bit more of a deeper color. Now turn the heat down. You don't want this to rapidly boil because that could curdle your coconut milk, which is fine if that does happen because you can still eat it, but just has a little flecks of white in there. But gentle simmer about 20 minutes. So while the chicken's doing its thing, we're gonna make some crispy little bits and pieces to go on top of the soup. Now I'm using some wonton wrappers to do that today. So I'm gonna make a little pile and then slice them into about three or four millimetres wide and just loosen them up a little bit. Now I've got some hot oil and I wanna put little bunches of these noodles, I guess they are now, into the oil. And then just like magic, they turn into crispy little strips. Now time to have a look at this glorious soup. It's just like this big bowl of sunshine. I love the color. Now here's where we have to do some final seasoning. Wow, that flavor. When you think about all the things that are in there, the lemongrass, the galangal, the fish sauce, the kaffir lime leaves, the garlic, and it's all turned into this beautiful, harmonious, magical soup. Wonderful. So in these bowls, I have some thin, fresh egg noodles. In Chiang Mai, you would have these noodles that are slightly wider. Now I couldn't for the life of me find them at my supermarket this morning and I live in Thailand. So probably gonna be very hard for you guys to find. I'm gonna get some chicken onto there and then some of that soup. Isn't that just the most satisfying color? So I'm gonna put a little bit of coriander in here. Now I want those crispy noodles on top. And then on the side, you wanna serve this with a lime wedge and then I've got some little red shallots and then a little chili paste with some spice. And this little green vegetable here is pickled mustard greens. They have like a sour flavor and a crunchy texture. So it adds flavor and texture to the soup. So before you eat it, you've got to squeeze your lime juice on, add a few of these bits and pieces. And there you go guys, Chiang Mai's very famous khao soi noodle soup. It is possible to make a beautiful version of this at home. Always brings me so much joy. Yum.