Pad Thai at Home

The noodle dish pad Thai enjoys a big following, and many of us have eaten our fair share at local spots like Rama, Thai Kitchen and Thai Pepper over the years. Each bite presents that characteristic crossroads of sweet, savory and spicy, while also delivering a diverse texture thanks to chopped peanuts, bean sprouts, spongy rice noodles and tender shrimp or tofu.

Surprisingly, pad Thai is simple to make at home, and once you perfect your process, it will become a go-to meal ready in half an hour. At heart, it’s simply a stir-fry of softened noodles, a protein of choice and vegetables, all tossed in a sauce and garnished with peanuts, cilantro and lime.

None of this is hard, but the sauce requires focus, since it’s the dish’s thumbprint. The sauce components are usually tamarind paste, fish sauce, sugar and red pepper flakes, delivering citrusy, salty, sweet and spicy elements. Creating your own pad Thai means playing around with proportions to find what tastes best.

For my pad Thai, I started with three recipes by cookbook authors I really like, including New York Times columnist Marc Bittman, Australian chef and Thai cuisine authority David Thompson and Nancie McDermott, whose books Quick and Easy Thai and Quick and Easy Vietnamese are among my personal favorites. Bittman’s formula for pad Thai is a cinch to follow and complete, but I found the sauce had too much tang and lacked sweetness. When I stuck to his cooking process, but substituted David Thompson’s sauce formula from his seminal, Thai Food (a 2:2:1 ratio of sugar to fish sauce to tamarind paste), I had much better results. Nancie McDermott helped, too. Her recipes are often adjusted to include on-hand ingredients, so her sauce formula actually omits tamarind and uses a 3:2:2 ratio of fish sauce, soy sauce and sugar with a shake of chili flakes. The result is saltier, but it’s also lighter in texture.

A word on ingredients: Tamarind paste comes in a small jar on some (not all) Asian food aisles and in most international markets. I have found it both at Whole Foods Market and Vinh Phat. Fish sauce is commonly found on Asian food aisles and Asian markets. If you’ve never cooked with it, brace yourself for its powerful smell. After all, it’s made from fermented anchovies. However, it cooks up nicely and provides that back-door savory mouthfeel you expect from pad Thai.