Pad Thai Recipe (with Chicken or Shrimp) - Cooking Classy (2024)

FAQs

What meat is Pad Thai best with? ›

Pad Thai is a Thai noodle stir fry with a sweet-savoury-sour sauce scattered with crushed peanuts. It's made with thin, flat rice noodles, and almost always has bean sprouts, garlic chives, scrambled egg, firm tofu and a protein – the most popular being chicken or prawns/shrimp.

You've probably had pad thai in your local restaurant, but what you had may not be anything like the authentic version. First, it should not have ketchup or any tomato product in it. Second, it should not be syrupy sweet. And finally, it shouldn't be just a heavy, soggy clump of noodles with bits of green onions.

Pad Thai Ingredients

The dish is mixed with a tamarind sauce and served with lime. The flavors of this dish are centered around a sweet-savory fusion. Salty, nutty, and with that slightly sweet sauce, it's a treat for tastebuds!

Often made with shrimp (or prawns), chicken or tofu, pad thai also contains scrambled eggs and bean sprouts, and is typically garnished with crushed peanuts, cilantro and a squeeze of lime. The ingredients in the sauce are what give the dish its distinctive flavor, but they vary greatly from recipe to recipe.

It can definitely be a part of a balanced, well-rounded diet. While pad thai includes many nutritious ingredients, its sodium content is considerably high.

Pad thai is made with rice noodles, which are stir fried with eggs and chopped firm tofu, flavored with tamarind juice, fish sauce, dried shrimp, garlic, shallots, and sometimes red chili pepper and palm sugar, and served with lime wedges and often crushed roasted peanuts.

The color of the country style Pad Thai was more vibrant, the taste sourer and a little bit spicier than the regular one.

When it's sold in restaurants outside Thailand, the noodles are sometimes bright orange – that's because sauces or spices, like paprika, have been used instead of tamarind. Authentic Pad Thai is a light reddish-brown colour.

Pad Thai is often served with chopped peanuts, bean sprouts, scallions, and sometimes carrots, cilantro and/or a wedge of lime. The sauce is key and is comprised of sugar, fish sauce, rice vinegar, and tamarind.

The name of this establishment refers to the five flavors (ha/ห้า=five, roat/รส=flavors) which are present in a good pad Thai: salty, sweet, sour, spicy, and savory.

How to make Pad Thai less fishy? ›

If there is a will there is a way though. You can either buy a non fish-based fish sauce or simply prepare your own by infusing soy sauce (or tamari) with a bit of seaweed and dried mushrooms. If it sounds like too much effort and you're only after a quick lunch, just use a straight soy sauce instead…

Rice vinegar: rice vinegar provides the sour element to the sauce. It's definitely not a mouth-puckering sourness, but again it balances out the other ingredients. Tamari: gluten free Tamari (or soy sauce if you don't need to eat GF) adds saltiness and savoriness to the sauce.

If regular onion is all you have just use a little less as shallot has a less intense flavor. Shrimp – Dried shrimp and fresh plump shrimp. Dried shrimp is commonly used in Pad Thai needs to be rinsed and chopped. A great substitute is shrimp paste.

The best side dishes to serve with pad thai are spring rolls, green papaya salad, fried rice, satay skewers, Thai coconut soup, cucumber salad, mango sticky rice, crispy tofu and steamed dumplings.

In Thailand, shrimp paste goes by the name kapi (or gkapi). It's a purple-brown condiment made by mixing krill (tiny shrimp-like crustaceans) with salt and leaving them to ferment. The resulting mixture is then dried and ground into a dense and sticky paste that's the consistency of almond butter or coarse pâté.

Meats used in Thai cuisine are usually pork and chicken, and also duck, beef, and water buffalo. Goat, lamb, and mutton are rarely eaten except by Muslim Thais in Southern Thailand.

What is The Difference Between Pad See Ew & Pad Thai? Noodles – Pad Thai is often made with thin rice noodles whereas Pad See Ew will have a wider, flatter rice noodle. Sauce – Pad Thai is all about the tamarind whereas Pad See Ew takes its primary sauce flavor from soy sauce.