We’re suckers for pad thai and can slurp down a plate of these tangy-sweet noodles faster than you can squeeze a lime wedge. We’d love to master making this dish at home (thus ensuring a steady supply). If anyone can break down restaurant-quality pad thai into something a home cook can duplicate, it’s Mark Bittman.
With its emphasis on fresh flavors and its quick stir-fry method of cooking, pad thai has all the key qualities of a quick, weeknight meal. Mark Bittman’s recipe is no exception. The prep work is minimal and all the vegetable ingredients get quickly sautéed until they’re just cooked through. The sauce is briefly simmered in a separate pot and then tossed together with the veggies and the noodles. Dinner is ready in 30 minutes, tops.
We were very happy to see tamarind paste in the sauce ingredients. Many home recipes leave this out, but it’s really key to the balance of sour, sweet, and savory flavors in the dish. It’s also much easier to find these days than it used to be.
Unfortunately, though, we felt like the tamarind got a little lost. Even when we were whisking the sauce together, we worried it was a little heavy on the fish sauce and honey - at least for our taste. This was true in the final dish dish as well. There was a lot of savory and sweet, but not so much balance of tangy-sour.
The final dish was also fairly wet. We probably should have let the vegetables cook for longer before adding the noodles and the sauce, but we got impatient. The cabbage lets off a lot of liquid, and it’s important to let that cook away. By the way, four cups of cabbage seems like a lot, but it cooks down a lot and ended up feeling like the right amount in the end.
Another thing we always forget when making pad thai is to be careful of over-cooking the noodles. Rice noodles are usually soaked in hot water until they’re limp, drained, and tossed into the stir-fry at the end. The problem is that if you let them sit in the water too long, they break apart and get mushy when you try to toss them with the other ingredients. Letting them soak until they’re barely al dente is the way to go.
We don’t quite have our ultimate homemade pad thai yet, but this recipe has potential. Next time, we’ll adjust the proportion of sauce ingredients and see if we can get close to our ideal.
Do you ever make pad thai at home? What’s your method?
• Get the Recipe: Pad Thai from Mark Bittman
Related: Technique: How to Use Tamarind Pulp
(Images: Emma Christensen)
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Looks like a great recipe - and I am always a fan of anything Bittman. I love that he uses tamarind as well, but sheepishly admit that I do not.
I like my pad thai really garliky and with at least three eggs. My go to sauce is a riff off of the Rebar Cookbook one, with molasses (or palm sugar), fish sauce, soy and ..... a little ketchup. Yup.
I will pick up some tamarind today though, for my ketchup shame is great.
This is the recipe I've settled on, culled from a bunch of different sites and attempts. I like my pad Thai to be both light on sauce and on the more savory/sour side than sweet, so make of that what you will and adjust the sauce accordingly.
STUFF
Rice noodles
Peanut oil
1/2 package firm tofu, chopped
1/3 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic (pressed or finely chopped)
bunch of scallions, chopped
2 eggs, beaten lightly
bean sprouts
chicken/whatever else you want (we cooked chicken separately and added at the end.)
SAUCE
6 tbs tamarind juice (if you don't have the juice, you can dilute pulp in boiling water for about 20m and then strain it)
4 tbs fish sauce
2 tbs rice vinegar
1 tbs brown sugar (more if you like it sweeter--most recipes call for more sugar than this. Just taste the sauce to see.)
NOTE: The proportions are easy (3-2-1) so you can add more sauce if you like it saucier.
1. Completely submerge half a package of rice noodles in a bowl of warm water while you're doing the rest of this stuff.
2. Heat about 1 tbsp of the peanut oil in a wok or other large pan until shimmering. Add the tofu; cook until it starts to turn golden. Add the onions, cook until softened, about 6-7 minutes.
3. While the onions are cooking, mix together the sauce in a separate bowl and whisk together.
4. Add the garlic and scallions to the wok; stir for about a minute until fragrant. Make some space in the center of the wok/pan and pour in the eggs and scramble. Once they're almost done but still a little wet, stir them into the rest of the mixture.
5. Drain the noodles; add them and the sauce to the mixture and toss repeatedly until the toppings are tangled in the noodles and the noodles are cooked through. Add bean sprouts and other toppings if you want. Serve with a slice of lime and crushed peanuts.
I am always a fan of Mark Bittman, but we tried this recipe last fall, and have since referred to it as the "Pad Thai Disaster of 2009." It was awful. I still shudder at the memory. I love Pad Thai, and Mr. Bittman, but this recipe did not work for us at all. Hopefully we'll find a good one at some point.
How fitting that I am just back from the Asian market with a re-up on Tamarind paste, fish sauce and palm sugar!
The one and only Pad Thai recipe you'll ever need is from Chez Pim http://chezpim.typepad.com/blogs/2007/01/pad_thai_for_be.html
I love me some Bitty, but honey and cabbage in pad thai? Um, no. Pim's "recipe"--more like a formula, really--is all you need to know.
As she will tell you, you need to adjust the proportions of fish sauce, tamarind and sugar to taste.
Ditto what splatgirl said. The Pim recipe/formula is can't lose perfect.
Has anyone seen the Good Eats episode of pad thai? I know it's AB's thing to be precise and very detailed, but if I recall correctly his instructions involved engineering a giant wok/grill thing in your backyard and setting a stopwatch. I love Mark Bittman for his "it can't really be that hard" approach to everything.
We use this recipe with a fair amount of success: http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/recipes/Pad_Thai.htm
We like it saucy, so I make more sauce then it calls for. Sadly I have not been able to find tamarind so we have tried various substitutions. Yum!
love Pad Thai! And yes, fish sauce and tamarind are absolutely required IMO, otherwise it's not really Pad Thai.
Pad Thai is a top ten favorite at our house. Sadly, Mr. Bittman's pad thai recipe was our very first encounter with him. I'd read him in the NY Times for ages, but made this as a first go. We now call him Mr. Bitchman due to our disappointment.
Is there anything you can use besides fish sauce?
I love most of Mark Bittman's recipes as well but I tried this Pad Thai recipe last week and it was just plain awful (the one that recently appeared in the NYTimes is slightly different - I haven't tried it yet). As other readers have commented, the Chez Pim recipe - for me - is still the best one out there.
I use a modified Cooks Illustrated recipe for my Pad Thai, but the most important thing I've learned is not to be afraid of adding new/different veggies to it. In fact, I've substituted half of the noodles with summer squashes (yellow/zukes) "noodles" with a julienning peeler with really great results! (it's a wee bit soggier, but very, very YUM and the soggy can be cut down if you remember to make your squash noodles ahead of time and let them air dry a bit)
In the past I've tried making the sauce from scratch, but always hit a stumbling block when I got to the tamarind paste or juice. It's easy enough to find in the Asian grocery stores, but I could never find a version that wasn't loaded with high fructose corn syrup. In comparison, almost any can or jar of pre-made sauce has natural ingredients (go figure).
CST--besides the umami note of the fish sauce, the main flavor element it is trying to achieve is salt (sweet/sour/salty is the elemental basis of PadThai). I would urge you to at least TRY the fish sauce if you can--it doesn't actually impart a fishy flavor, just yum. If you can't abide that, maybe use just salt or soy sauce as an alternative.
Engineer girl---we can't be talking about the same ingredient then. Every brand of tamarind paste/concentrate I've ever purchased is JUST tamarind and water. It's usually packaged in a plastic tub or jar, but unless you are at an Asian market that carries Thai ingredients, you may strike out. You can also buy the dry pods, remove the husks and soak the seeds to get just pulp, or purchase a pre-husked seed/pulp product in a blister package. It sounds like you are talking about a condiment kind of thing that's tamarind flavored rather than the plain ingredient.
Pim!
its much much better to make your own tamarind sauce with tamarind flesh, boil it, and then strain it through a mesh.
we use only the tamarind, tomato paste, sugar to make the basic sauce and then add fish sauce during the cooking process at my parents restaurant.
and for the rice noodles, always make sure to soak in cold water, never hot or even warm!
I know it's not authentic, but I always sub soy sauce for the fish sauce. Unless there's another vegetarian substitute?
elise890 - ditto on the thai table recipe, and would definitely recommend the site in general. the eggplant and the catfish fry here are my favorites; http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/recipes/.
Another voice here for Pim's recipe. This post inspired me to give it a try tonight (it's been ages since I've made pad Thai!), and aside from the sauce being hands-down the best pad Thai sauce I've ever made, the cooking method is spot on.
I made this Pad Thai tonight, and it was an unmitigated disaster. It was astoundingly awful, and it's not me - I've made GREAT Pad Thai from other recipes! I'll think twice before trying "easy" Mark Bittman recipes again.
splatgirl: I guess that's my problem-- the Asian groceries around here are mostly Korean, not Thai, so I've never seen fresh tamarind paste. The stuff I've been able to find is either in jars or cans.