Thai Basil Pork (Pad Ka-Prao Moo) | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone this is kenji and we're cooking pad crop powder so um crop pro my my thai pronunciation is very very bad um crop pro pork with holy basil stir-fry with holy basil um although in this case it's sort of a misnomer because we aren't actually using holy basil we're using just regular old italian sweet italian basil holy basil is pretty difficult to come across in the u.s sometimes you'll find it at asian markets sometimes i find it at the farmer's market from the farms that specialize in asian vegetables uh in the summer especially sometimes you'll see it but most of the time what you're able to find is either thai basil which is the basil that has a sort of more licoricey flavor and uh it's kind of purple purple leaves or you're going to be able to find this um italian basil which is what you know what you see in the summer all the time what we would make say pesto out of um the difference the difference in flavor is actually pretty significant but that doesn't mean that it's not delicious made with this type of basil as well it's just it's just a different it's just a different dish um if you can at some point find holy basil um i would suggest trying it because uh it's a different flavor and it'll give you a different um unique thing that you might have never tried before um so i'm getting i don't know a half dozen half dozen seven eight six seven eight garlic cloves in here um this is for about a pound of pork which i'm doing you can do this with any meat um you can do you know chicken turkey pork beef duck fish whatever you want normally i would use uh thai bird chilies but i don't have any thai bird chilis but i do have this serrano so that's what i'm going to use so the serrano i'm going to cut it in half and then i'm gonna very you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna take some of the seeds out because i know my daughter's eating um and and we have um sometimes sometimes we have trouble with spicy foods these days so i'll make it a little bit less spicy for her so just take the seeds and ribs out so it's not quite as hot um of course you can make it as hot as you want so if i was making this for myself or say like my dad or my wife um and and at least i wasn't eating i would probably do like and i was using thai chilis i would use probably six or seven thai chilis would be quite hot um you know this dish has those sort of classic thai flavors the um uh the hot uh hot salty from the fish sauce um no no real sourness to this although you can always squeeze a lime over it if you want um and sweet from uh either dark soy sauce which is what we're gonna use or if you don't have dark soy sauce you can use a little bit of extra sugar so normally you would do this with a shallot the the thai shallots are these little little red guys that have a sort of more intense flavor than a western shallot um but i'm using red onion which works works just fine i'm just going to slice it up and then give it a quick rough chop that's good enough and this is all going into the mortar and pestle here so mortar and pestle i'm gonna do a tiny little sprinkle of sugar actually just to uh just for the abrasive action just to help this grind a little better while we're in the mortar and pestle and then we're gonna do it if you don't have a mortar and pestle you can chop all these things by hand you can uh you can do them in the food processor um the mortar impressive will sort of release a little bit more flavor but in this particular dish it doesn't really matter as much as say if you're making you know like a curry paste for instance comes a much better mortar and pestle than than it doesn't food processor or pesto comes out much better than a mortar and vessel than it does in a food processor so we want to this dish by the way is super super super simple it's one of the one of the easiest stir fries out there it doesn't require like it doesn't require a crazy burner you can do this on an electric burner you could do it in a skillet if you want you don't have to do it in a walk i'm going to do it on a walk just because i have one um very few ingredients and very forgiving because you're working with ground meat so even if you kind of slightly overcook it it's still going to be tender you know as opposed to say like sliced meat which can start to get a little tough or dry if you overcook it ground meat also really picks up flavor really quickly so you don't need to you don't really need to marinate your meat like you would if you're doing a stir fry with more sliced meats all right that's about as fine as we need to be could go finer um if you want to like you can you can reduce it to a paste if you want but this is good enough for me all right so i'm going to preheat my wok get a kitchen towel i'm gonna be cooking some noodles here later as well so a couple tablespoons of oil don't need a huge amount and for this this type of stir-fry the oil doesn't really need to be kind of smoking hot the way it would for some other stir fries um the way it would for say like uh i don't know like more a lot of chinese style stir fries you get much higher heat this one you don't really need to this dish by the way um the recipe is based on my friend lila's she she simmers dot com and she has a couple books out um i'm not gonna try and pronounce her last name because it's very long and it's thai and i'm gonna mess it up so i will just call her leela she simmers.com she has a book called bangkok um which where you'll find i believe you find this recipe in that one either in there or um in her book uh simple thai cooking or simple thai food i think it's called simple thai cooking she also has a book that just came out called about about the thai grill all of her books are wonderful um and her website shessimmers.com is also wonderful and she in general is just a wonderful person she is she gave me some great advice the last time i visited bangkok some places to eat all right so we're putting that paste in there just gonna let it stir fry gently i mean this recipe is loosely based on her recipe it's not really not really exact but this dish you'll find you'll find it like it's a very common street food um you know like all over all over thailand in fact you'll you'll see street vendors making this um i've seen it serve like in little cellophane packages on trains they'll come around the aisles and serve it to you bus stations and homes all right now we got our pork going in so we don't really want any of that to brown too deeply we just wanted to kind of get fragrant and this is just ground pork [Music] you want to use relatively lean ground meat for this particular stir fry this is kind of kind of lean ground pork and whereas some stir fries you kind of have to work in batches because you don't want the um you don't want to crowd the pan because you'll start sort of steaming the meat as opposed to frying it with this one you don't really have to work in batches you can just kind of go because you're not really aiming for this sort of really smoky singed flavors that you get in some other stir fries you really just want to cook the meat through um all the flavor is going to come from the aromatics and the sauce so for our sauce what we're doing is we're doing light soy sauce so about a about a tablespoon or so fish sauce this is three crabs brand which is not the best but honestly i use it and it works just fine a couple tablespoons of fish sauce tiny bit of dark soy sauce maybe i do like half a tablespoon or something and then a little bit of oyster sauce um the oyster sauce i've seen it done with and without oyster sauce sometimes i feel like doing it with sometimes without oyster sauce will add kind of some sweetness and definitely a lot of umami lee kum ki they invented oyster sauce actually i think the story goes that someone was cooking oysters and the liquor they they left the pan on or something and the liquor reduced down and as it reduced it thickened up into this kind of rich gravy um and that's still how it's made really it's just oyster liquor that uh that is cooked down to a gravy so pretty intense briny it doesn't really taste fishy you know it's like not it's not oyster sauce if you told me that it was vegetarian i would believe you i would believe you um does it have other stuff you know it probably does have like sugar and stuff like that yeah water sugar salt oyster msg corn starch wheat flour caramel color yeah so they started adding stuff to it but it's a wonderful condiment it goes really nicely on stir-fried greens actually that's what i'm going to be serving with this i'm going to be serving some uh i think they're called a moringa it's a it's um it's these greens here let me see if i can find them these greens um they have a kind of citrusy flavor to them i found them at the asian greens vendor at the farmer's market this weekend they did a little like um tastes like sorrel that's what it tastes like kind of a citrusy thing all right this is almost done so you see i'm just kind of breaking it up as it goes into little pieces [Music] about it all right i got my sauce stir it up a little pour it around [Music] so this you're going to want some rice which i have cooking in the pressure cooker over there [Music] good [Music] definitely could be hotter i'm going to add some thai chili flakes to my portion and my wife's portion once we start serving this um but this yeah you serve it with rice frequently you'll serve it with um a fried egg on top um last step we take our basil it's about like you know big big solid handful of basil it's hard to have too much [Music] i'm just going to toss it until it's wilted [Music] mess the dish [Music] black and we will eat it with a spoon as they do in thailand the the proper way of eating like curries and dishes like this in thailand you get a a spoon in your right hand and a fork in your left and then you kind of use the fork to put stuff onto the spoon if you want to like put rice and some of the stir fry onto your spoon or some of the curry onto your spoon and then you eat with the spoon i'm just going to eat out of the serving bowl delicious come on here you go sit no shabu you can say it here um doesn't sit by the way because he uh he has a injury on his back leg he broke his knee a few years ago and so it's a little painful for him to sit so i never make him sit i do make my daughter sit though all right spiderman's favorite dish or pad if you want to i think if you want to be more accurate if you're making it with thai basil as opposed to holy basil all right well that's that and i will see you next time you know where we're at i thought i'd just show you real quick um how to fry an egg in a walk let me get my spatula a little clean again spatulator i'll just show you how excellent this wok is all right so you want a good amount of oil in there preheat it first until it starts to kind of lightly smoke and then a good amount of oil then it's going to make these kind of like puffy crispy eggs i kind of flash on oil i don't splash the oil splash your flashlight [Music] that's what gives you those kind of puffy crispy bubbles that's how they get those ty those eggs to do that in thailand any oil hot wok this guy my wok has lost a little bit of its seasoning for some reason recently i'm gonna grab my metal spatula for this [Music] i'm sure your wok is perfectly seasoned so it won't stick the way this one is sticking that's how i like the eggs crispy i love those crispy eggs oops looks like we lost a little yolk on this guy that's right i'm gonna splash them a little still touch a fish sauce eggs like that over rice over stir fry love it all right see you later

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 526,090

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Id: Y2nZWveLIRA

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020