Pad Thai Crimes

Traditional Pad Thai, I feel is easily one of my favorite foods in the world, it is the perfect balance of sweet, acidic, salty and umami. Umami is hard to explain, (I'm assuming that's a term that trips a lot of people up too,) but the best way to describe it is the taste of savoriness, but more than that. It is the taste that makes a seared or grilled piece of meat taste better than a boiled piece of meat, a roasted bell pepper compared a raw bell pepper or the difference between mild and sharp cheddar. Asian food is notorious for mastering the taste of umami, because most of their condiments; soy sauce, fish sauce, miso and sambal are all fermented which concentrates the umami flavor (also adding a lot of salt.) The reasoning for all of this fermentation and preservation in Asian cuisine is the historic need to utilize every bit of food provided by nature, the Maya did this by drying their maize, the Nortic States would do a lot of pickling, there are far more examples, but in southeast Asia they would ferment whether it be beans, chilies or fish.

When trying to master making Pad Thai, I looked through a lot of recipes and what I found is that the sauce is really the key to this unison of flavor. I saw three different types of sauce recipes, some involved boiling various dried fish and shrimp, all day as one step, letting all of the salty, fishy flavor condense into this small amount of ocean juice, then adding in the rest of the ingredients. The next type remains traditional in fashion, but replacing the dried fish with fish sauce. The last type I would find would be the completely wrong, I doubt the authors of these recipes have even had pad thai, I will explain this type in depth later. I made my recipe off of the middle technique because it yielded a flavor almost identical to the authentic pad thai I have had, made by people from Thailand, and it did not require me to purchase and handle large amounts of dried fish, which smells disgusting. The basic ingredients you want to see in a pad thai sauce recipe are simply tamarind, some form of sugar (usually palm,) and either dried fish or fish sauce.

After the sauce, the ingredients are pretty simple; rice noodles, egg, garlic, chili, protein (usually chicken, shrimp or pork,) bean sprouts,green onions and peanuts.

So earlier I mentioned the insultingly wrong recipes ingredients that you don't see in pad thai that I saw in too many “quick and easy,” recipes were soy sauce, peanut butter, balsamic and the WORST of all would have to be spaghetti. Soy sauce is really the only ingredient I would find acceptable if you are trying to make a vegan or vegetarian version. I understand the thought process that it is garnished with peanut, therefore lets incorporate peanut butter into it, but it is still wrong. By far, the worst crime I have seen in pad thai recipes would be to use spaghetti or any Italian pasta. I bought a pound of rice noodle at Publix for a buck, I have seen them at Walmart too (just dont tell my mom, none of my family is allowed there,) and I see an Asian grocer pretty much in every neighborhood in the United States, so there is no excuse whether it be availability or price, to use anything but rice noodles. Do not fall prey for these recipes, they are not real pad thai and I have done the pasta mistake before, there is a big difference in taste and texture.

Now that you know what flavor profiles work and do not, there is a lot of room for variation, any meat, tofu or julienne vegetables can be added and this can utilize leftovers to an extent.

Though my description up to this point make this dish sound super complex and complicated, it is in fact street food, so I promise you it is simple to make, just a large amount of ingredients. Making the sauce is mainly idle time and like I said before you can make a lot and save the rest for later. The actual stir fry though takes about 10 minuets at most to make once the pan hits the heat. Because of the speed of this, it is very important to have everything prepped before time so you can just throw everything in, failing to do so will lead to mushy or burnt ingredients.

After the effort that it takes to make traditional Pad Thai has been made, it will be one of the best single bites you will take. So use the right ingredients, be creative and be prepared!