Pad Thai? More like Pad Disaster!

Pad Thai

Inspired by my recent dinner at Sabai Sabai, Brian suggested that we make Pad Thai for our cooking date. He chose a recipe from the Thai Table, which called for multiple, special ingredients, such as banana flowers and Chinese chives.

Naturally, it was difficult to find many of the listed albeit optional ingredients, especially at Superstore, which does not carry the full range of Asian cooking staples. In the end, I settled for regular chives and tamarind pulp and forgot about the other hard-to-find ingredients. South of the equator, Brian was lucky enough to find tamarind paste. That cut down his cooking time by at least 30 minutes.
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The first step to making Pad Thai was, in my case, making the paste. This involved pouring boiling water over a block of tamarind pulp and letting it sit for about half an hour. Once it was soft enough, I broke it apart into little pieces and strained it to get tamarind paste (for a step-by-step guide, check out the Inquiring Chef).

When my paste was ready, Brian and I got started on the actual recipe. We soaked our noodles, cut up all our ingredients, and roasted our peanuts. Then we worked the wok: We threw in shallots, garlic, and tofu on some oil, followed by the noodles.

In the absence of a good wok, I find that the noodles can stick to the bottom of the wok pretty quickly no matter how fast you toss them. (During my second run at Pad Thai, it helped to take the wok off the burner before adding the wet ingredients.)

Once the noodles were in, we added the tamarind paste, sugar, fish sauce, and chili pepper to the mix. At this point the noodles were still a little raw, so we added some water to cook them some more. 

Our Pad Thai didn't turn out to be very good. Brian found that his take needed a bit more kick, whereas mine needed a lot more flavour. I tried doubling the proportions of the sauce during my second run, and it helped up the taste factor, but overall, it still needed a lot more work.

Overall, our results were not at all unexpected. Pad Thai was and is a very active and easy-to-screw up recipe. It seems like the type of dish that needs a lot of adjusting as you go along, and it will definitely take a few tries before it becomes a constant presence at the dinner table.