I am very, VERY picky about my Pad Thai. The first Pad Thai I had was at The Bamboo on Queen Street in Toronto eons ago and I fell in love. All those noodles! All that seafoodie flavour! Yup, I was in heaven. I have been searching for an authentic recipe ever since. This recipe was recommended to me by a beautiful blogger friend Robyn but sadly, it is not the recipe I am looking for.
This is the problem. Every recipe for me is about the sauce. Warning bells should have gone off when I saw that you were supposed to use a sweet chili sauce like Heinz. I have made made Pad Thai recipes that call for ketchup and you know, I just don’t think that is what they use for authentic Pad Thai. I am a little sensitive to fish sauce so I used a little less but boosted the flavour with oyster sauce. There were no chilies at my store so I used Sriracha hot sauce for the heat.
My rice noodles clumped together, next time I will put olive oil in the water to prevent this from happening.
The recipe says it is vegetarian but how can it be with fish sauce in it? When I was a vegetarian, I would have been offended by that. Since I am no longer a vegetarian, I added some shrimp to the frying pan and then when they were done removed them and browned up the tofu.
This is where the photographs of the cooking process came to an end. After I sauteed the garlic and added the egg the sauce hit the pan and the too-sweet smell of cooking ketchup turned me off immediately! I then added the noodles, followed by the veggies. I put my camera on the counter and saved the tofu and the shrimp on the side, in case my tastebud suspicions were correct.
I put some of the Pad Thai in a little bowl and topped with some peanuts, tofu, shrimp and a lime wedge. I tasted it. Yup, did not taste like real Pad Thai. All I could taste was fishy ketchup. Sigh.
According to the web site, a lot of people loved it and I wish I could say I was one of them! I am always worried about taking on recipe recommendations because I worry about disappointing my online friends. It is hard to explain just how picky I am about food. I am CRAZY picky and my palette does not forget flavours. It is kind of a curse!
But this foodie will not give up, she will keep searching for that authentic Pad Thai flavour she longs to taste again.
Have you tried looking for a recipe at the Food Network or Whole Foods websites? I usually always find what I am looking for between those two resources. Good luck!
The Canadian Food Network’s recipes mostly had ketchup in it but I found this one on the American site by their magazine, has good ratings and sounds more authentic. I think I will try that instead. Wow, Whole Food eh? I will have to check them out, they’re only in the U.S. but I have heard so much about them. Thanks for the foodie referral Pink Heels!
phewy. Sorry it didn’t work out for you. It really is very tasty. I know that Young Thailand does use ketchup in their sauce as we would often order it without / less…
Hope your quest is successful! Everyone needs a good pad thai recipe.
Suzie, I’m going to have a look around because I remember once successful making this ages and ages ago. I have a funny feeling that I don’t have that recipe anymore. It might have been The Frugal Gourmet’s book on Asian cuisine. I think a lot of the authentic flavour comes from tamarind.
Good luck on your quest!
Oh I am so sorry TheSweetOne! I wanted to like it, honest. Dang!
Interesting that you have made this before Jamie and that it might be a Frugal Gourmet recipe? How interesting! Mom picked up some tamarind paste for me and I think you’re right, that is probably what the ketchup is trying to mimic. Wow, I will actually be able to do something with that paste now! 🙂
wow, none of the pad thai I’ve ever tried at restaurants had ketchup in it, I’m sure! That sounded very strange to me.
A word about your noodles: please, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t oil your noodles.
First: olive oil has a distinctive enough taste that it would stick out like a sore thumb in an asian dish. If you had to oil your noodles, use peanut oil, or maybe something with little/no flavor, like grape seed.
Second: oiling your noodles is an “old wives tale” that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny — all it really does is make your noodles too slimy for the sauces to properly adhere to them.
Third: if you’re getting clumpy noodles, it’s likely does to the absorption of water. This can happen with over and under cooking — over cook the noodle, and the surface becomes engorged and slurps unto just about anything else it touches; under cook the noodles, and any moisture (which is a lubricant) is pulled away from the surface and into the heart of the noodle. Again, the result is stickiness.
If you’d like to address the clumping head-on, might I suggest the following:
Noodles wait for no one. Have everything — especially the sauce — ready and waiting when you put the noodles into the water. That way, when you pull the noodles from the water ( a bit under cooked ), you can drop them immediately into the sauce for the last bit of cooking — and the noodles will absorb the sauce magnificently and won’t stick!
Use A LOT of water — experiment with using twice as much as you are, now (adjusting salt to match). This will keep the noodles from becoming a tangled mess in the pot.
Use a noodle spoon or tongs to retrieve the noodles in an orderly fashion — giving you much more control.
If that’s too much of a hassle, be sure to reserve a cup or two of the cooking liquid before you strain your noodles. This reserved cooking liquid is a lifesaver for adjusting the sauce in the pan, should it prove to “tight”. Loosening it with the cooking liquid — rich in noodle gluten — will prove much better than with hot tap water.
Just my 2¢!
🙂
Hope you find a good recipe soon Suzie!
Wow, that’s quite the noodle lesson
Silus Grok. Don’t despair Suzie, I know the golden recipe will find it’s way to you. It looks amazing as always!
That Pad Thai does look good, and it sounds delicious. Too bad it’s not the one you are looking for. 🙁
I’ll be curious to hear when you find the “right” Pad Thai recipe because I think that would be totally yummy! Love the tip about the olive oil in the water.. rice noodles are definitely problematic. You’ve reminded me I have cooked shrimp in my freezer!
Aside from Silus’ comment cracking me up because of the “noodles wait for no one” statement in which I pictured pad thai running away from ketchup (because I’d imagine they would), this is the recipe that’s most similar to what I was eating when I was in Thailand: http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/recipes/Pad_Thai.htm
Go with your intuitions next time. Chili sauce such as Heinz…
A good complement to go with your pad thai would be to soak some hot red and green chili peppers in soy sauce and when your noodles are done, top with that.
Good luck 🙂 Pictures still looked yummy.
Thank you for posting a recipe that did not work as it’s a big help for people like me new to cooking Thai. Hubby & I were surfing for good Thai recipes online last night (yes, this is what we do for fun). He loves to cook Thai on Sundays but we are still new at it. I’ll take a peak at your previous thai recipe posts. Thanks for the inspiration 🙂