How to Make an Easy Recipe for Pad Thai

[Music] in the 1930s the dish pad thai had a great impact on the identity of thailand the public welfare department started a bai thai campaign now along with the basic recipe for pad thai the slogan noodle as your lunch was introduced now julia and i do not need to be convinced to eat pad thai but making it at home can be a challenge so we're going to show you how to make pad thai noodles for lunch and dinner maybe a snack oh definitely a snack sounds good pad thai is very easy to make nothing's very difficult there are a lot of little ingredients so with our recipes we focused on one making it easily accessible to the american pantry and two who wanted to serve four people we're gonna start by making a condiment that we're going to serve with our pad thai and this is a third of a cup of white vinegar we're going to add a little bit of spice this is a serrano chili i'm just going to slice it into very thin pieces i'm going to go all the way to the stem and we're just going to put these slices right into the vinegar all right moving on we're going to start with preserved daikon radish it adds sort of a pickley flavor it's a little bit of heat in the daikon i couldn't find it really hard to find in a normal supermarket so we're going to make our own pickled radish just using radishes it makes sense right and so here i have a quarter cup of water and i dissolved already half a teaspoon of sugar and a quarter teaspoon salt in the microwave took about 30 seconds and now i'm gonna cut up some radish into nice sticks and to do that you just want to slice the radish lengthwise and then you can just slice the slices into nice matchsticks sometimes you can find daikon that's fresh at your supermarkets it's also called japanese radish often but it can be a little tricky to find sometimes so just regular radishes is always a sure bet all right so right into this little brine i made now these radishes are going to sit in here and for about another 15 minutes then we're going to take them out and pat them dry we'll toss them into the pad thai at the very end sounds great set those aside moving on to the sauce this is the real deal this is the heart of pad thai this is a quarter cup of fish sauce into it i'm going to add three tablespoons of sugar and three tablespoons of an ingredient we couldn't substitute now this is tamarind and tamarind has a very sort of raisiny sour tangy flavor you can buy it in different forms but we liked tamarind concentrate three tablespoons and the flavor is really just iconic to pad thai it's kind of the perfect fruit in terms of sweet and sour balance all in one all right so we're just gonna whisk this together until the sugar dissolves sounds good now a little bit more about tamarind i remember when you can buy tamarind at a supermarket now you can find it in many different forms this is what fresh tamarind looks like it's a pod and inside it has a very flavorful pulp this is the pulp that's been concentrated into a very thick paste both of these are very flavorful but they need to be reconstituted a lot in order to use for pad thai you can also find tamarind in powdered form but it's a little too weak for our palette so we love the ready to use concentrate which is what julia's using today it's ready to use right out of the package big flavor you do want to make sure to find on the package the words product of thailand or manufactured in thailand this is your best bet all right so on to odd ingredient number two dried shrimp so in thailand what they do is they take these tiny dried shellfish they peel them they salt them and they let them dry in the sun and the flavor they add is really distinct and very authentic but they're really hard to find so we're gonna make our own okay so here i have four shrimp and i've already peeled them completely and deveined them and we're gonna cut them into small pieces cut them through the middle almost like butterfly ones all the way through so that they're nice and thin and then we're gonna take them we're just gonna cut them into about half inch pieces i'm going to take all this chopped shrimp toss it with eighth of a teaspoon sugar eighth of a teaspoon salt gonna stir this around and we tried drying it in a skillet took about 20 minutes which was much too long and we found it much easier to dry them in the microwave before you put them in the microwave you want to spread them out it's making sure none of these shrimp are really touching each other because as they start to dry they turn into little gluey bits yeah we're finding out that the microwave does more and more we're actually toasting coconut in the microwave the perfect way to do that toasting nuts and now we're drying shrimp what can't it do it's a miracle all right so into the microwave they go again 50 power for a couple minutes until they reduce their size by about half and they're very dry oh these look perfect all right so these were in the microwave for just a few minutes and you can see they're about half their size this is so clever and doing this adds such an incredible depth of flavor to the finished pad thai and it's so easy salty and chewy you love it all right so we're gonna set these over here now time for the main ingredient the rice noodles so this is eight ounces of dried rice noodles and these are the thick ones they're about a quarter of an inch thick the best way to rehydrate them is to use boiling water it's about six cups of boiling water we're just going to let them sit there for about eight minutes and i'm going to give them a gentle toss every few minutes to make sure they're not sticking together and just until they're nice and soft and pliable all right bridget so these noodles have been soaking for about eight minutes and you can see they're nice and soft but they're not mushy yet because remember we still have to cook them a little bit with the sauce and the other ingredients in the skillet you can see i'm pulling on it a little bit stretchable it's not breaking all right so now it's time to drain these guys we also want to give them a good rinse both to cool them down and help prevent them from sticking to one another washes away some of that starch and really rinse them well all right those look pretty good they're nicely rinsed now i'm gonna toss lightly with two teaspoons of oil prevent them from sticking together as they sit and wait their turn in the skillet all right put these back in the bowl there you go noodles and we are ready to start cooking so we're going to start by adding two teaspoons of vegetable oil and i have to say putting your vegetable oil in a container like this very handy especially with stir fries when you're adding little bits of oil at a time we like a skillet because it has a nice flat bottom lot of surface area works well for stir fries and pad thai so that oil is just shimmering i'm going to start with our dried shrimp we're going to cook these for about three minutes until they turn about golden brown you just want to give them a stir every now and again make sure they're not getting too golden on one side oh you can see they're nicely golden all the way around and now we're gonna start to build our pad thai rather than build it in the skillet which has limited surface area our aha moment for making enough pad thai for four people is building it in a bowl into the skillet we're gonna add another teaspoon of oil now we're gonna add a little garlic and some scallions now traditional recipes use a combination of shallot and garlic chives garlic chives really lovely hard to find unless it's the height of summer around here so we're going to substitute both scallion whites and scallion greens so this was four scallions i separated the whites and minced them and to this we're going to add one clove of garlic we're just going to cook this in the pan for about a minute that looks pretty good so here i'm going to take the pan off the heat scrape this into the bowl with the dried shrimp and you want to make sure to get this all out because any bits left will really start to burn two more teaspoons of oil we're going to crank the heat up to high and now we're going to add some shrimp so traditionally there are three proteins in pad thai tofu eggs and shrimp for this recipe we want to make it a little easier we jettisoned the tofu we kept the shrimp and the eggs it's a pound of shrimp total but minus the four shrimp that we used earlier to make our own dried shrimp let them cook for about three minutes until they turn opaque and are slightly browned around the edges of course we'll flip them over halfway through these shrimp look pretty well cooked you can see they're nicely browned on both sides and that only took about three minutes very gorgeous now we're actually going to add the eggs right to the pan with the shrimp cleared a little area in the center of the pan two more teaspoons of oil go right in the center in go the eggs now this is four large eggs that i beat together you want to stir them around just want to cook them for about 30 seconds or so into the bowl okay now back in the skillet two more teaspoons of oil again we're still over high heat we're gonna add the drained rinsed noodles and the sauce we're just going to cook this three minutes or so until most of the sauce is absorbed into those noodles all right so these noodles are nicely cooked they're warmed through all that sauce has been absorbed it's go time yay so into the bowl go all those noodles to this we're gonna add a little bit of our vinegar that we're also gonna serve with we're gonna add two teaspoons now we're gonna add the scallion greens remember we added the scallion whites earlier and that's replacing those garlic chives here are drained and padded dry pickled radish last but not least two cups of bean sprouts nice little bit of crunch right now we're just gonna toss this all together i wish you guys could be here because what i'm smelling is amazing all this freshness in there a little bit of pickle and of course the fish sauce amazing all right so we're going to put this onto a nice big family style platter it serves more than two it does thank goodness right and it's not done till we finish with a few roasted but unsalted peanuts it's about a quarter cup lightly chopped and i'm just going to platter you up a whole big pile some shrimp some of that egg a little bit of vinegar yes all right a couple of chilies might fall in there perfect let me give you a lime wedge or two let's take a moment to drink this in shall we this is light and fresh and clean tasting everything is perfectly cooked the egg is not dried out it's actually still nice and moist and the shrimp not rubbery at all it's perfect and i love getting those little bits of dried shrimp in there i tell you what they are the bacon of the crustacean world so our outstanding pad thai recipe well it starts with a homemade sauce use the microwave to turn fresh shrimp into dry and then soak and drain rice noodles stir-fry in batches toss with homemade toppings and then finish with peanuts so from america's test kitchen to your kitchen noodles are now your lunch or maybe dinner or anytime with our everyday pad thai it's incredible isn't it thanks for watching america's test kitchen what'd you think well leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or you can just say hello you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later i'll see you later

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 80,725

Keywords: pad thai, how to make pad thai, pad thai recipes, shrimp pad thai, easy pad thai recipe, homemade pad thai, cooking tips, learn to cook, americas test kitchen, america's test kitchen, easy recipes, noodle recipes, recipe for pad thai, recipe, cooking, thai food

Id: GvCOxSPv5Os

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019