Your Pad or Mine (Thai) - Recap

Alton’s ready for a trip. His suitcase is packed, all shots up to date, Thailand guidebook read and language tapes in the player. Then the phone rings. It seems the first choice has become available so Alton’s not going anywhere. He does the next best thing: he eats pad thai, a meal promoted by Thailand’s prime minister during World War II to help his countrymen cope with a rice shortage. If your seat on the big ol’ jet airliner has been taken, worry not – with Alton’s help you can visit the land of pad thai, square in the middle of… Good Eats.

Thailand (once called Siam) is the only Asian country that has never fallen under foreign control. But it has been influenced by foreign cultures – China in the north, India in the west, and even England to the very far west. Pad thai reflects all these influences and thai cuisine too – a careful balance of five flavors. With a giant tongue and a propane torch Alton explains: the four basic flavors are salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. Added to that is burning, which isn’t so much a flavor as a sensation. These flavors come chiefly from ingredients such as… Alton’s at a loss. Whipping out a light and a magnifier, he studies the dish before him, deconstructing it into its parts. Its ingredients fall into three categories: familiar, somewhat familiar, and “what the?”

Most of the parts list is readily available – garlic, peanut oil, rice wine vinegar, scallions, roasted salted peanuts and small, hot chili peppers. Alton selects about eight small dried Japanese chilis. Limes and mung bean sprouts are also available most places. (You can tell mung bean sprouts from alfalfa sprouts because the mung bean sprout is thicker.) Mung beans go bad in just a few days, so cook fast. Alton heads to the dairy department next for a package of extra firm tofu (silky tofu will disintegrate in the wok).

Although rice noodles are often available in the mega mart Alton believes better quality can be had at the Asian market, so that’s his next stop. The rice noodles he wants are dried. Sometimes called rice sticks, these noodles come in various shapes and sizes (like wheat pasta). Alton selects noodles that are similar to angel hair pasta. Nam pla is fish sauce (or more precisely, fish water). It’s crucial to the cuisine of Asia. Salted anchovies are stacked and left to ferment for as long as a year. Good fish sauce is reddish brown and translucent – never murky. Ingredients should be limited to fish, salt, water, and maybe a little sugar. There’s no need for MSG or preservatives because bacteria can’t thrive in the salty fish sauce.

Alton pokes his head into the freezer case next. He’s looking for dried shrimp, a concentrated briny flavoring that’s exactly what its name implies: tiny shrimp, dried in the sun.

The strange pod of the tamarind tree is Alton’s next target. The flavor is somewhat like lime raisin. There’s no need to harvest the paste from the pod; others have done this for you. Just pick it up from the cold case and reconstitute it at home. Palm sugar comes from the sticky sap of the sugar palm tree. It’s made the same way maple syrup is made; Alton grabs a package from the cold case. The last ingredient is salted cabbage, sometimes called tung chai after a city famous for it. This will lend flavor and texture.

Cooking all this correctly requires a lot of heat delivered quickly. For that there’s no better dish than a wok, so Alton visits a restaurant supply store that caters to the Asian restaurant trade. There he explains what kind of wok to get: 14 or 16 inch diameter, with a handle. It should be fashioned of high carbon steel and should be deep and rounded.

Stir fry happens fast, so it’s vital to prepare the ingredients ahead of time and organize them properly. Alton starts the night before with his tofu, squeezing some moisture out of it. The next morning he soaks the tofu in a mixture of soy sauce and Chinese five spice powder to replace the extracted water with flavor.

Next Alton reconstitutes the tamarind paste with some boiling water. While that happens he retrieves the marinated tofu and slices it thinly. When the tamarind has soaked up water Alton builds the sauce: palm sugar, fish sauce, and rice wine vinegar form the base. He strains the tamarind into this with a fine strainer to keep out the strings and seeds.

Hot tap water poured over the rice sticks reconstitutes them. While waiting Alton prepares each remaining ingredient into its own small bowl: scallions, garlic, two eggs, salted cabbage, dried shrimp, bean sprouts, peanuts, and ground dried chili peppers.

For the right wok heat Alton uses hardwood charcoal in a grill and a wok ring. The cooktop just isn’t the right surface; Alton would only stir-fry indoors in the direst straits. (Alton’s legal team appears to remind folks to follow local fire codes about grilling.)

When the wok is rocket hot, a squirt of oil goes in, then the tofu. After it browns on the edges Alton removes it, adds a little oil and most of the scallions, all the garlic and the eggs. He lets that cook just until it starts to solidify and then scrambles it. The noodles and sauce go in next, followed by most of the sprouts and peanuts and all of the cabbage and shrimp. That gets tossed and allowed to sit; the introduction of all those ingredients has dropped the temperature so it must sit until the steam from the sauce reheats everything. At that point Alton puts the tofu back in and garnishes with the rest of the sprouts, scallions, nuts, and chilis. Lastly, he adds the limes (sliced into wedges) around the edges. Diners can squeeze the limes into the dish for added flavor.

Alton didn’t get his Thai trip, but his culinary curiosity has still opened the door to a larger world of good eats.

Share this article with your friends