Pad Tai: the recipe for oriental pleasure

Many tourists who have visited the "land of smiles" can not come to a common denominator on the question of which of the dishes of the local cuisine is tastier: that of yam or pad tai. The recipe for both is rather intricate, and it also requires both exotic ingredients and specific dishes. However, the desire to once again feel the sweet and sour burning taste of Thai dishes on the lips makes the Europeans run around the supermarkets of their cities in search of tamarind paste, coconut sugar and wok frying pans.

Here we will talk about noodles pada tai. This is a favorite dish in Thailand. It is prepared by street maques, served in various places of public catering: from the most democratic cafes to expensive restaurants. Rice vermicelli is the basis, and the ingredients can be various ingredients: chicken, shrimp, pork, Tofu. But these components appear on the stage at the very end of the culinary process, and therefore we will first describe how to prepare the "ordinary" pad tai, the recipe of which is given below.

If you have a large frying pan, you can not buy wok , but most products still have to go to the supermarket, the department of Asian or exotic cuisine. We need rice noodles pada tai. The recipe recommends buying such that its width is about 5 mm. For two servings, there will be enough sachets. We also need Thai fish sauce, tamarind paste, coconut sugar. The latter is not to be confused with reed - it is similar to the caramel "Korovka". Lazy one can advise you to buy a ready-made "Pad tai sauce" in a bag. Then you do not have to mess with the ingredients described above. In the usual market, we buy lime, peanuts, eggs, shallots, as well as those components with which you go to make pad tai.

We start to cook the dish with the sauce. Split in a mortar 50 grams of lumpy palm sugar. Dissolve it in a mixture of three spoons of tamarind paste and the same amount of fish sauce. By the way, this seasoning can be prepared for future use - it is perfectly stored in the refrigerator. Fry a handful of peanuts without oil, peel the nuts from the husk, unfold not very finely. Now put in a colander and soak in hot water noodles for pad tai. The recipe does not indicate the cooking time - it depends on the quality and thickness of the pasta. The main thing is do not brew them with boiling water, otherwise it will come out on noodles, but a gruel. Macaroni should be elastic, but still elastic.

Fry in a wok on vegetable oil crumbled very finely 3 cloves of garlic and a small onion. When browned, add the filler (chicken or pork, shrimp, tofu). We take the colander out of the water, shake off the noodles from the excess moisture, throw it into the wok. Actively stir everything with a wooden spatula. Pour the sauce. Noodles are raked to the walls of the wok, and on the middle, where the bottom is thinnest, we break the egg. Spill it, stirring the frying pan to create a kind of pancake. We fill the noodles with half a spoonful of red pepper, a handful of soybean, cut into a green onion. Remove from the fire pad tai. The recipe recommends watering the dish with lime juice and sprinkled with crushed peanuts.

If you want to prepare this dish with seafood, you need to take into account a small nuance. Shrimp is better to buy already peeled, but not boiled. If purchased fresh or frozen, they need to be freed from shell, head and legs. Pad Thai with shrimp recipe offers to do not with fish, but with oyster Thai sauce, having previously squeezed in there a small fruit of lime. The rest of the process is no different from the above recipe.