Pad Thai
Tamarind, fish sauce and palm sugar in balance, and noodles soaked in warm water rather than boiled. Everything must be within reach before the wok goes on.
- Prep
- 30 min
- Cook
- 10 min
- Resting
- 30 min
- Total
- 1 hr 10 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Crustaceans
- Eggs
- Fish
- Peanuts
- Soya
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Noodles
Sauce
Stir fry
To finish
Method
Noodles
Soak the noodles in warm — not boiling — water for 30 minutes, until pliable but still firm with a white core.
Warm water and not boiling. The noodles finish cooking in the wok in the sauce, and a noodle that is already soft turns to paste the moment it meets heat and liquid. Bendy but not cooked is the target.
Sauce
Warm the tamarind, fish sauce, sugar and water in a small pan until the sugar dissolves, then taste it.
It should be aggressively sour, salty and sweet all at once, in that order of prominence. This is the dish, and it is worth adjusting now — more tamarind for sour, more fish sauce for salt, more sugar for balance — because once it is in the wok there is no time.
Stir fry
Put everything within arm's reach of the hob before you start: drained noodles, sauce, prawns, garlic, tofu, beaten eggs, beansprouts, spring onions.
The whole cook is about four minutes and there is no moment to fetch anything. This is the step people skip and it is why home pad thai goes wrong.
Heat a wok over the highest heat until smoking, add the oil and then the prawns in one layer.
Cook for 1 minute a side until just pink, and lift them out.
Add the garlic, preserved radish and tofu and stir fry for 1 minute.
Push everything to one side, pour the beaten eggs into the clear space and let them set for 20 seconds before breaking them up.
Add the drained noodles and the sauce and toss constantly for 2 minutes, until the noodles have absorbed the sauce and turned glossy brown.
Return the prawns, add the beansprouts and spring onions and toss for 30 seconds only — they should stay crunchy and raw-tasting.
To finish
Turn out onto plates and top with crushed peanuts, chilli flakes and a lime wedge to squeeze over.
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What to expect
- Taste
Sour first from the tamarind, then salty from the fish sauce, then sweet from the palm sugar, with heat and freshness added at the table. Getting those three in balance is the entire dish and is why the sauce is tasted separately.
- Aroma
Tamarind and fish sauce hitting a hot wok, which is pungent and specific.
- Texture
Chewy noodles, crisp beansprouts, soft egg, crunchy peanuts. Four textures and the peanuts are the one people leave off.
- Sound
The wok, briefly and loudly.
- How the flavour moves
Sour, salt, sweet, then the lime squeezed at the table resetting all three.
- Serve it
Very hot, immediately.
- Goes with
Nothing. It is a complete plate, and the lime, chilli and peanuts are the seasoning that finishes it.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Moderate, and the difficulty is organisation rather than technique.
- Cost
Mid, mostly the prawns.
- Equipment
A wok, and everything laid out within arm's reach.
- When to make it
A weeknight, with thirty minutes of preparation first.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
The noodles turn from pale to glossy brown as they absorb the sauce, and there should be nothing loose in the wok.
- And it feels like
Noodles with a slight chew, prawns just cooked, beansprouts still crunchy. Soft beansprouts mean it was overcooked at the end.
- Food safety
Prawns are done when opaque with no grey translucency. Fish sauce and tamarind are both shelf-stable. Crustacean allergy is severe and this dish contains both prawns and, often, dried shrimp — declare it clearly.
- Where it goes wrong
- Boiling the noodles, which makes them paste.
- Not tasting the sauce before cooking, when there is no chance to fix it later.
- Fetching ingredients mid-cook, by which time something has overcooked.
- Ketchup instead of tamarind, which produces a different dish.
- Cooking the beansprouts, which should stay raw and crunchy.
- Too much in the wok at once, which steams instead of frying — cook two portions at a time if the wok is small.
- If it does go wrong
Too sweet: more tamarind and lime. Bland: fish sauce. Noodles clumping: they were undersoaked or the wok was too cool. Mushy: they were boiled. Pale: not enough sauce, or the wok was not hot enough.
- Making it ahead
The sauce keeps two weeks in the fridge, which turns this into a fast weeknight dish.
- Keeping it
One day, and it is much worse.
- Reheating
A hot wok with a splash of water. The noodles soften further.
- Freezing
No.
- Leftovers
Eat cold rather than reheating, which is genuinely better.
- Scaling it
Cook two portions at a time at most. A domestic hob cannot keep a full wok hot.
- Substitutions
Chicken instead of prawns, cooked the same way. Tamarind concentrate is much stronger than paste — use half and taste. Do not substitute ketchup, which appears in a great many Western recipes and produces something that is not this dish.
- Dietary swaps
Contains fish sauce, crustaceans, eggs, peanuts and soya. A vegetarian version uses more tofu and a soy or vegetarian fish sauce, and works well. The peanuts are structural to the finish rather than a garnish, so a nut-free version loses something real.
- Shopping for it
A Thai or Chinese grocer for tamarind paste, palm sugar, preserved radish and the noodles. All of them are cheaper and better than supermarket equivalents.
- Keeping the cost down
Chicken or extra tofu instead of prawns cuts the cost by more than half. Tamarind and palm sugar keep for a year.
- Sustainability
The prawns are the part worth thinking about: farmed warm-water prawns vary enormously by country and farm, with ASC certification the most useful signal available to a shopper, and wild tropical trawling has among the highest bycatch ratios of any fishery. The tofu-only version is genuinely good rather than a compromise here, and it is how a great many Thai cooks make it. Rice noodles and tamarind both travel well and store for a long time.
- Nutrition
Balanced enough — protein, noodles and vegetables — though the palm sugar makes it sweeter than it looks.
- Worth it?
Balance the sauce before you light the hob, and have everything within reach. The cooking is four minutes and the preparation is the recipe.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Thailand, and recently.
- Also called
Phat thai — literally 'Thai stir-fry'.
- Said out loud
pat tie.
- What the name means
The name means Thai stir-fry, which is itself a clue: it was named to be national.
- History
Pad thai is one of very few dishes with a documented act of state behind it. From the late 1930s the government of Plaek Phibunsongkhram promoted it heavily as part of a programme of nation-building that also changed the country's name from Siam to Thailand — recipes were distributed, noodle carts encouraged, and rice noodles pushed as a way of reducing the consumption of rice during shortages. The technique and the noodles are Chinese in origin, which is part of the irony of a dish adopted as a national symbol.
- Why it matters
The dish most non-Thais name first, and one that Thai people often point out is not what they cook at home most often. It is genuinely popular and it is also a piece of successful cultural policy.
- When it is eaten
Street food, and a fast dinner.
- The traditional way
Wok cooking at very high heat, with everything prepared first — mise en place is not a refinement here, it is the method.
- How it changed
Outside Thailand it has become much sweeter, and ketchup frequently replaces tamarind, which changes it into a different dish.
- Regional variations
Wrapped in an omelette; with crab; with no protein at all.
- How this version differs
The sauce is tasted and balanced before cooking rather than assembled in the wok, and the noodles are soaked in warm rather than boiling water. Both are how it is done properly and both are commonly skipped.
- Sources and credit
The Thai state under Phibunsongkhram, which is an unusual answer to have.
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