Pad Thai

Yesterday, I tried Pad Thai, one of my favorite dishes whenever I go to a Thai restaurant. I searched for many recipes online and this seemed like the best:

http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/recipes/Pad_Thai.htm

Here is my experience, tips and Indian substitutes. It turned out to be OK, one step away from what you get at a restaurant. It had some ingredient missing, but I couldn't figure out what.

The changes I made in the recipe above:

I bought a bit thicker noodles from Thai Kitchen because they are easier to handle, and I was right. Add a pinch of salt and a little bit oil in the water when cooking the noodles. This will make sure that the noodles don't stick together.

I used a lot of sprouts (you can get them from a grocery store like Safeway or Milk Pail, much cheaper in Milk Pail than Safeway $0.5 vs. $1.5). The online recipes suggest to use fish sauce and though I don't eat fish, I bought it anyway to have an authentic taste. The websites also warned that it smells awful but I totally forgot how bad fish can smell when I was buying it. It STINKS! If you can stand the smell for 10 mins, then you are fine. But, according to me, the sauce didn't make much of a difference, so you can skip it all together or use soy sauce. You can use a lot of tamarind, as we Indians always like to and it will only enhance the taste. Note that excessive tamarind might cause throat problems. I didn't use banana flower or turnip. I added snow peas, broccoli and used spring onions for dressing. The first two are great nutrition wise and broccoli doesn't taste as bad with Pad Thai. There is no Indian touch in the recipe (I couldn't think of any), but I guess I can experiment with the curries. Also, I substituted brown sugar with jaggery (may be this is the only Indian substitute :)). Jaggery is much better than brown sugar both nutrition and taste wise.

Tips: If you don't have a wok or have a low heat stove (as is mine), fry tofu separately and then mix it later on. I had put the bean sprouts, vegetables and tofu together at first and the water from tofu never got dried up and the vegetables didn't get stirred fried well. Try to add more vegetables instead of noodles because noodles are just carbohydrates and you can get a lot more from vegetables.