A few weeks ago, I came across a pad thai tutorial, and I've been patiently waiting for an opportunity to make it ever since. It took me a little while to gather ingredients but last night Chris and I were finally in a position to give it a shot.
Pim, author of this tutorial, has much more experience cooking Thai than I ever will, so it's pointless for me to post a recipe, especially since mine didn't really work. However, I will mention a few things that I thought were missing from her instructions.
On fish sauce: This is easily acquired in your local grocery store. It looks a lot like soy sauce, and I believe that it serves a very similar purpose, which is to add salt to a dish. When you start to prepare the pad thai sauce, you will diligently reach for your fish sauce, intending to measure out the half cup required. If you, like me, have never worked with fish sauce before, you will, upon opening the bottle, be confronted with the foulest, most vile odor of your life. At this point, you should plan on a 5 minute recovery period. Use this time to convince yourself that fish sauce probably doesn't go bad, and therefore this smell is a good thing. This will take a strength of character you've probably never needed before. Fortunately, time is not crucial at this point, so use as much as you need to regain your composure. And you get an extra weapon which I didn't have: the smell will go away once you simmer the sauce. I had to take this on faith, but you all can be guaranteed that as soon as you heat the sauce, the smell will disappear and be replaced by the smell of tamarind, which is far more pleasant.
Rice Sticks: These are the noodles that go into pad thai. I've always seen pad thai made with linguine shaped noodles, aka flat, and judging by her photos, Pim is in favor of this. I could only find very thin, round rice noodles, and I couldn't get these to soften completely. I ended up adding about 1/4c of water into the noodles as soon as they went into the pan, and this did the trick, but I don't know if that would be necessary with the right noodles.
Adding Cold Things to Hot Oil: I don't deep fry, so I've never had the chance to get a handle on using lots of really hot oil. But based on what happened last night and all the deep fried turkey horror stories I read around Thanksgiving, I suspect that it's really important to make sure the chicken is fully thawed and dry before it goes into the wok. Just a theory, really, and if you aren't too attached to your arm hair to begin with, you can probably ignore this.
