Thai Chef Makes Authentic PAD SEE EW

Sawasdee ka, welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen. Pad Thai may be the most popular Thai noodle dish amongst foreigners, but do you know what's more popular amongst Thai people? Pad See Ew. Pad See Ew is a street food that you can find all over Thailand, and it's so popular because it is just so incredibly good. Chewy, fresh rice noodles in that sweet, salty sauce, and that smoky wok char. Mmm, there's nothing quite like it. And my Pad See Ew recipe has been a Hot Thai Kitchen favorite for over a decade. People have told me that it is better than takeout, and they can easily make it again and again, because not only is it so delicious, it is a quick and simple recipe. And today I have an updated tutorial for you with new tricks and tips to make the old classic even better. And by the way, this recipe is also gonna be in my e-book. Yes, I've just released a brand new e-book with 25 of the most popular classic Thai recipes. I wanted this to be a really user-friendly way for you to cook from my recipes, so you can cook your favorites anytime without having to go searching for it online and without any ads. Each recipe also has the direct link to my YouTube video tutorial right there if you need it. So check it out at the link in the description below, and thank you in advance for your support of Hot Thai Kitchen. All right, let's get to that recipe now, shall we? Starting with the sauce. For the sauce, I've got here some oyster sauce, then I'm gonna add some soy sauce, fish sauce, Thai black soy sauce with a dark color and rich flavor, and Golden Mountain sauce, which is a type of soy sauce. If you're unfamiliar with any of these sauces, head over to the recipe post on hotthaikitchen.com. There will be more information, including all of the substitutes. Then for protein, I'm using bite-sized pieces of chicken breast here, but this can be pork, beef, tofu, anything. Let's give it some flavor with soy sauce, a touch of sugar, which will help with browning. And if your meat is lean, adding a little bit of water will help add juiciness to the meat. Give that a good mix, and then we can let that sit while you prep other things. For vegetables, we are gonna need gai lan, or Chinese broccoli, which is the classic. Choose smaller stems if you can, as they're more tender and less bitter. I like to first remove this little branch, and then thinly slice the fat part of the stems on a diagonal, and then you can roughly chop the thinner stems and the leaves. Aside from that, you're also gonna need some eggs, chopped garlic, ground white pepper, and some sugar. And now let's talk about the star of the show, the noodles. Not me, the noodles. In Thailand, you can find pad see ew made with a few different kinds of noodles. Rice vermicelli, egg noodles, which is more of a southern Thai thing, but the most common and the classic, and I think the best, is made with fresh white rice noodles, or what we call sen yai. Now some of you can buy this at the Asian grocery store, lucky you. If you cannot, do not worry, because homemade ones are better anyway. And I just uploaded a brand new tutorial for how you can make these at home using just two ingredients I'll link to below. In theory, you can buy dried versions of these rice noodles, but let me tell you, they are not the same. The end results are not nearly as good, the flavor, the texture is quite different. So my opinion of this is that if you've never had the fresh one, you'll probably be satisfied with the dried version, but if you've seen the light, you've tried fresh noodles, you really can't go back, it's not the same. So keep the dried ones for pad see ew emergencies only. Which happens sometimes. Now if you've bought fresh noodles from the store, but you get home and it's this cold hard block and all the noodles are stuck together, you don't know what to do, don't panic. Here's how you deal with that. First try your best to separate them into big chunks without breaking them. Then spread them out onto a microwave safe plate, and heat them at roughly 70% for one minute. Take them out, try to separate them a little bit more now that they're a little warmer, and rearrange them while you're at it so they heat more evenly. Put them back in for another minute, and then you repeat this process for a total of 3-4 minutes until the noodles are hot and soft enough to be separated into individual strands. Before we cook, one very important thing. This is a recipe that you want to cook one serving at a time, because if you crowd the wok, you will trap a lot of moisture and that moisture will steam your noodles and cause them to turn to mush. Remember these noodles are fresh, they are fully cooked, so you've got almost no room for excess moisture before they overcook. So you want to allow the noodles to evaporate excess moisture from the sauce as fast as possible. Also, if you overcrowd the pan, you won't get as much of that nice toasting that we're going to do in a minute. So, my recipe is for two, so I've divided all my ingredients in half, except the protein. The protein you can cook all at once, we're just going to do that all together. But everything else should be divided into one. Each portion will only take like a few minutes, so it's not going to take you forever to do them one at a time. Having said that, this is not a dish I would recommend for a 10-people dinner party. As always, I like to cook my protein separately. This allows me to control the doneness of the protein, get nice browning on them, and you can do this part, as I mentioned, all of your protein can cook at the same time. Unless, of course, you've got like a giant bucket of it, then obviously you don't want to do that at the same time either. Okay. Spread that out. And then, I'm going to let that sear without disturbing for about a minute, or however long it takes to brown the thing. Once the meat looks more than halfway done, then I'm going to come in. Ooh, look at our nice browning! And give them a toss, so it can finish cooking the other side. Okay. Let's turn it off. It's fully cooked now, and we're just going to take the chicken out of the pan and into a bowl for now. So I have cleaned my wok because I noticed the chicken was sticking a little bit, and if the chicken sticks, the noodles are definitely going to stick because the noodles are very sticky. So for this recipe, you want a well-seasoned carbon steel wok, even a cast iron pan would work as long as it's well-seasoned, or if all else fails, a non-stick wok. You don't want to do this with a stainless steel pan, definitely going to stick. All right? But if after searing the meat, there's no sticking, you don't need to clean the wok in between. All right? Let's go. Heat's back on. Little bit of oil goes in. Not too much because the noodles are already oily. Some garlic. And I'm just sautéing the garlic until the smallest bit starts to turn golden. Okay. And then the egg goes in. And I have cracked the eggs ahead of time because if you get shells in here, there's like no time to fish out the shell. Okay. Eggs are good. Just like 10 seconds on the egg. And then the vegetables go in. Vegetables. Ah! Always explode. I don't know why. Vegetables are tossed. In goes the noodles. And then the sauce. And the sugar. And that's it. Now you're going to toss everything until the noodles are mixed together with the sauce. And if you see two pieces of noodles sticking together, just try to separate them because you don't want clumps of noodles because the sauce can't get into the noodles that way. Okay. Once the sauce looks like it's well distributed, spread the noodles out around the pan and let it sit and toast to get that smoky wok char. This is the difference between pad see ew that is delicious and pad see ew that is epic. Okay? The toasting of the noodles. If you've got smoke alarms, it's a good idea to cover them with a shower cap at this point. Don't forget to take it down after. Okay, so your heat should be high for this part to get maximum toasting. And now I'm going to... Oh my god! Look at how beautiful that toasting is. I'm going to cry. I'm going to toast the other side. And then... Oh my gosh! Look how charred that is. It's not burnt. It is artisanally charred. Okay, so noodles charring is looking pretty good. You can do this a couple more times if you want depending on how much time you want to spend, how much charring you want. But you can imagine that if you overcrowded this wok with noodles, the charring is not going to happen. Okay, I think that's enough charring. The protein goes back in. You're going to notice a lot of liquid pooling in the bowl. You do not want to put all that in even though that is delicious. It is going to sog out the noodles. The noodles cannot handle any more liquid than the sauce. And that's it. Turn it off and it's done. One more toss just for fun. Woohoo! Ta-da! Look at this! Oh my god. Look how perfect that is. The noodle charring. Condiments. Very important for patio. The classic condiment is white ground pepper, which you could have added in the wok, but you can also add it at the table in case you've got kids or somebody who doesn't want pepper. Also, very importantly, chili vinegar. So the flavor profile of this is rich, sweet, and salty. So a little bit of spicy acidity in the form of chili vinegar makes a huge difference. It's very easy. This is basically just chili and white vinegar mixed together. There are variations and I have a whole video that shows you how to make it. It's a breeze to make. All right. The smell of white pepper and patio together is so nostalgic to me. Like this is the smell of childhood. I ate this a lot growing up. All right, here we go. One bit of vegetables in every bite because of that crunch. Oh my god. Mmm. It's perfect. It's the perfect food. Soft and chewy and elastic noodles. That is the perk of a homemade noodle. Crunchy veg. Sweet and salty flavor profile that just keeps you going back. This is the one dish I always finish because it's so hard to stop for better or for worse. The chicken, it's because we took the time to add some seasoning and a little bit of extra water. It's not just like protein for the dish. It has flavor. It has texture. The chicken itself is delicious as well. I mean, you saw how quick that was to make. It's totally worth doing it one portion at a time. So you've got noodles that are dry, well toasted. Mmm. This, I can eat this every day. It's so good. So I hope you give it a try. The recipe, as always, will be on hotthaikitchen.com. And on the recipe post, I will also include all the tips, all the storage questions, all the substitutions, everything you possibly think of. Check that website post. A special thanks to all of our Patreon members who help support the show. And thank you, as always, for watching. And I will see you next time. Sawadee ka.