Steak Pad Thai Recipe - Home Chef (2024)

FAQs

What meat is best for pad thai? ›

Pad Thai is a Thai noodle stir fry with a sweet-savoury-sour sauce scattered with crushed peanuts. It's made with thin, flat rice noodles, and almost always has bean sprouts, garlic chives, scrambled egg, firm tofu and a protein – the most popular being chicken or prawns/shrimp.

Traditional pad thai sauce includes fish sauce, vinegar, sugar and tamarind paste. Tamarind paste is not easily found at a regular grocery stores so I substituted rice vinegar. If you would like to use tamarind paste, substitute about 2 Tablespoons in place of the rice vinegar in this recipe.

Spicy Pad Thai Recipe: Sesame Oil in Thai Cooking.

Pad Thai is often served with chopped peanuts, bean sprouts, scallions, and sometimes carrots, cilantro and/or a wedge of lime. The sauce is key and is comprised of sugar, fish sauce, rice vinegar, and tamarind.

It can definitely be a part of a balanced, well-rounded diet. While pad thai includes many nutritious ingredients, its sodium content is considerably high.

The dish is mixed with a tamarind sauce and served with lime. The flavors of this dish are centered around a sweet-savory fusion. Salty, nutty, and with that slightly sweet sauce, it's a treat for tastebuds!

Tamarind concentrate: This is the starring ingredient in pad Thai that gives the sauce its signature tangy, sweet, and fruity flavor. Granted, some American Thai restaurants have switched to using ketchup in its place, which gives the dish a notably different and less-tangy flavor.

The vinegar-sugar mix works well in dishes like pad thai chicken. If your recipe calls for 1 tablespoon tamarind paste, substitute with 1 tablespoon vinegar mixed with 1 tablespoon brown sugar. If using fresh lime juice, substitute 2 tablespoons lime juice for every 1 tablespoon tamarind paste.

You've probably had pad thai in your local restaurant, but what you had may not be anything like the authentic version. First, it should not have ketchup or any tomato product in it. Second, it should not be syrupy sweet. And finally, it shouldn't be just a heavy, soggy clump of noodles with bits of green onions.

A word of warning to all those Thai restaurants that think it is OK to serve Pad Thai with a wedge of lemon instead of lime. I'm not sure if this is a cost-cutting exercise but it is absolutely not OK. Pad Thai needs a wedge of lime for seasoning - end of story!

What is the red stuff in Pad Thai? ›

The sauce that coats noodles in Pad Thai should be a light brown color that comes from a sauce made with tamarind paste, fish sauce, and lime juice. Some authentic versions add shrimp paste which can give the dish a deeper red tint.

When it's sold in restaurants outside Thailand, the noodles are sometimes bright orange – that's because sauces or spices, like paprika, have been used instead of tamarind. Authentic Pad Thai is a light reddish-brown colour.

The name of this establishment refers to the five flavors (ha/ห้า=five, roat/รส=flavors) which are present in a good pad Thai: salty, sweet, sour, spicy, and savory.

Traditional Thai cooking calls for a whole range of fresh herbs and spices, from ginger to galangal, and Thai basil to turmeric. However, none is more prominent than the fiery chilli, featuring in just about any Thai dish in its various forms—dried, fresh, pickled, and so forth.

Meats used in Thai cuisine are usually pork and chicken, and also duck, beef, and water buffalo. Goat, lamb, and mutton are rarely eaten except by Muslim Thais in Southern Thailand.

The common meat that you are likely to find in Thailand is chicken or pork. Due to the Hindu Buddhism country, beef is not commonly eaten in Thailand. Only a few restaurants serve beef. Southern parts of Thailand are more likely to eat beef than pork.

The best side dishes to serve with pad thai are spring rolls, green papaya salad, fried rice, satay skewers, Thai coconut soup, cucumber salad, mango sticky rice, crispy tofu and steamed dumplings.

So it's very common to see Thai people eat noodle soups with chopsticks and a spoon but stir-fried noodles such as pad see ew and pad thai are more commonly eaten with a spoon and fork. Some Thai people of Chinese descent do prefer chopsticks for all kinds of noodles though.