In point of fact, this recipe came from a chef in Thailand and is as close to that recipe as memory can serve.

Thanks to K for bringing this into my life.

Phases

1. Saucy Intro
2. Prep
3. Saucy Cooking
4. The part where everything speeds up

1. Saucy Intro

The major feat, by which I mean the most important part of the recipe, not the most difficult, is to create the sauce. Once you have the sauce you can store it for a month or two in the fridge and keep using it to make more pad thai. It’ll be just as though you were the president of Thailand, except that as of this writing Thailand is a monarchy and as such has no president.

Extra Credit

It is optional but recommended to place just outside your apartment a little imitation dwelling - a bit like a doll house on LSD - with soft drinks deposited inside.

Cultural context: every plot of land, it is said, is owned not by you or your landlord but by a local spirit. The idea is that you can please the spirit with a symbolic offering, left in a shrine. See above. In practice, the offering one sees in Thailand is usually one brand of soda pop or another, from which we can conclude that engaging with the spirit community is largely a matter of pragmatism.

Some people doubt this part of the recipe. But no clinical trials as of yet have been able to disprove the existence of real estate spirits, arguably because it’s such a common-sensical idea one feels no need to study it. In any case, why not? Impress and delight your neighbors by calling it the cultural appropriation station.

The Wonderfully Simple Rule

When making the sauce, here is what you want:

1 part sweet, 1 part savory, 1 part sour.

Simple, but surprisingly difficult for a Westerner to follow because our every instinct tells us to stop adding sugar already.

2. Prep

Sauce Ingredients

For the sauce, you need the following ingredients:

• Tamarind, preferably in the form of paste, preferably sour (not sweet)
• Limes
• Brown sugar
• Palm sugar, if you can find it
• Fish sauce, which is to say, oil extracted from the body of a fish and left to rot
• “Oyster sauce”
• Soy sauce

Without tamarind it won’t taste much like pad thai, unfortunately. But you could give it a shot.

Without fish sauce, what one can do instead is to (very carefully) review one’s life choices up to this point.

Non-Sauce Ingredients

For the rest, you need:

• Flattish rice noodles
• The dessicated bodies of tiny dead shrimp
• Peanuts - preferably in the form of little crumb-sized bits of peanut that have been lightly toasted
• One of: [shrimp, tofu, chicken]
• An oil that can handle really high heat, like avocado oil - not butter, not olive oil
• An egg (1 egg for 1 person)
• Bean sprouts
• Sweet radish
• Green onions, such as scallions, chopped

Sauce Pre-Cooking

When preparing the sauce, one step in particular requires some attention: making of the tamarind slurry. To do this you simply combine a bit of the tamarind paste with water and dissolve as much tamarind into the water as possible by stirring it around continuously, perhaps teasing some of the tamarind pulp into the water with a fork. If you find the water stops absorbing the tamarind paste because the water is over-saturated, you can add a bit more water. You want to end up with something fairly viscuous. Tamarind has a unique flavor that cannot be replaced with just any ol’ acid, unfortunately. Lime alone doesn’t cut it.

Once the tamarind sauce exists, create the salty, sweet, and sour components using the following ratios:

• the salty component is 1:1:1 fish sauce to soy sauce to oyster sauce
• the sour component is 2:1 tamarind sauce to lime juice
• the sweet component is 1:1 palm sugar to brown sugar

It may seem like a lot of fish sauce. It sort of is. The fish sauce is key.

Reserve a little of each component so that you can tweak the flavor later on.

Combine the sour, salty, and sweet components in a 1:1:1 ratio.

Double the volume of sauce by adding water. That is, 1:1 sauce to water.

3. Saucy Cooking

Fill a pot with the watered down sauce and reduce (cook) it on medium heat for about 8 minutes until it thickens slightly, tasting it towards the end to confirm that it has that wonderful, Thai-like flavor. You can tweak the ratios at this point by adding individual components as necessary to get a 1:1:1 sweet:salty:sour flavor. The last time I made Pad Thai for example I ended up having to add even more sugar because it turned out I had gotten some variety with less sweetness than usual. It was a serving for two people and I ended up using like a third of the box.

Cooking the sauce lets the flavors meld.

You now have sauce concentrate. At this point, if you made extra sauce (a good idea), figure out the amount you think is necessary for cooking the noodles, which could be about half a cup for 1-2 people. You may have to experiment with this quantity to find the right balance; apologies.

Set aside the amount of sauce concentrate you decided to use. Dilute the concentrate by adding water, using about a 1:1 ratio of sauce to water.

4. The part where everything speeds up

The last bit of prep is to grind the peanuts into little slivers if that hasn’t been done already. Next commences the cooking of the pad thai.

Normally one would cook this in a wok over a nice big flame. To imitate that setup, just do what you can. Note that a wok by nature causes the food to move to the center, which is quite different from cooking food spread out all over a flat surface. In the absence of a wok, try to find a pot small enough that the noodles will, at first, be reasonably submerged in the sauce.

Heat the oil up as much as you can without setting off a fire alarm.

Get a utensil ready that you can use for stir frying because you will shortly need to be doing so rather frenetically.

Drop the egg into the wok (or pot, or whatever) and immediately break it up and keep on breaking it up with vigorous stir frying movements. The egg when it hits the pan will cook almost instantly. This part may take as little as 30 seconds.

• Add the shrimp (or tofu), about 3 tablespoons per person
• Add the sweet radish, about 1 tablespoon per person
• Add the dried shrimp, about 0.5 tablespoon per person (salty, caution)
• Add the peanut crumble, about 1 tablespoon per person

Let everything cook for about 10 seconds. You’re almost there.

Add the sauce and the noodles, and w-a-i-t for about 7 minutes, stirring occasionally. You want the noodles to absorb liquid as it also evaporates until the dish no longer has broth. If necessary, feel free to add a bit of water to keep the noodles cooking.

At the very end, add the chopped green onions and the bean sprouts for, respectively, character and texture.