THE ART OF MAKING Thai noodles
Getting popular dishes just right in a home kitchen doesn’t come easily
In Thailand, pad thai and pad see ew are just two of countless popular noodle dishes. But at Thai restaurants elsewhere, they are canon. “Those are the noodles that everyone who’s been to Thailand wants to make,” said Watcharee Limanon, who has moved between Bangkok and the United States since 1994, and built a small Thai culinary empire from her home in Yarmouth, Maine.
These dishes are especially popular, said Limanon, not only because they are widely available, extremely inexpensive and legendarily delicious. It is also because they have built-in “rot chaat dee” — the balance of tastes (hot, sour, salty, sweet and bitter), textures (crunchy and soft, chewy and crisp) and flavors (fishy and herbal, rich and light) that Thai cooks — and fans of Thai food — appreciate.
“You know how caramel cheese popcorn is a perfect food?” said Pailin Chongchitnant, a chef in Vancouver, British Columbia. “The sweet makes you crave salt, and the salt makes you crave sweet.” In Thai, she said, “glom glom” is the term for that can’tstop-eating-it quality.
“That’s what a really good pad see ew is like,” she said.
Even for expert Thai cooks, getting these dishes just right in a home kitchen doesn’t come easily. Noodle stir-fries are classic street food, cooked to order by vendors who can wield giant woks and dip into dozens of bowls of ingredients. But for those who live abroad, home cooking is often the only way to satisfy their cravings. (Thai restaurants outside Thailand, for many reasons, rarely cook food to Thai tastes.)
As a longtime seeker of perfect stir-fried noodles, I asked Limanon and other cooks how they adapt these dishes for their own kitchens, with local ingredients, appliances and challenges.
First off: A wok isn’t always the right tool for the job.
The tiny Manhattan apartment that chef Hong Thaimee first moved into had a tiny stove without a single powerful burner. So she long ago started using her Dutch oven for stir-fries.
“Even if you can get a wok hot enough to sizzle, adding the ingredients cools it way down,” she said. “What you need is a pan that holds onto heat,” with a flat bottom that comes into direct contact with the flame. (Thai noodle vendors often use flat woks, for the same reason.)
Although finding “authentic” ingredients can be a challenge, insisting on authenticity is often counterproductive, said Chongchitnant, who posts detailed recipe videos on her popular Youtube channel, “Hot Thai Kitchen.”
“People in Thailand are always playing around with the recipes anyway,” she said.
Chongchitnant grew up in Hat Yai, near the southern border with Malaysia, where she ate pad see ew made with egg noodles instead of the standard rice ones; later, the family moved to Bangkok,
where restaurants advertise their use of spaghetti and linguine. Although the original dish is made with beef — it is related to Chinese chow fun — she said that chicken and pork are just as popular in Thailand.
In North America, if she can’t find gai lan, Chinese broccoli, she uses broccolini (a hybrid of gai lan and broccoli), or cuts broccoli into long florets, because the crunch of the thick green stems is what the dish needs.
“People assume that a good substitute for an Asian ingredient is another Asian ingredient,” she said, noting that bok choy and Napa cabbage are often suggested — unhelpfully, in her view — as good substitutes for gai lan. “That’s not always true.”
Similarly, she said, non-thai cooks often assume that the best substitute for holy basil is Thai basil — but Italian basil is often a
closer flavor match.
Limanon, who runs Thai cooking classes from her home, guided me through making pad thai (she uses a nonstick skillet).
Before the cooking even began, I learned something immeasurably useful: When using dried rice noodles for stir-fries, no matter what the package says, you should never boil them. To stay soft and springy, not mushy, they need to soak in hot water until about 70% of the way to being done.
Although pad thai is the national dish, it is a recent addition to culinary tradition.
Thailand has its own rich and ancient cuisine, but the technique of stir-frying noodles entered the repertoire from China. Pad see ew has been popular for generations, but retained an identity that was separate from traditional Thai cooking.