Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

- You know, the street foods of Thailand are famous for their bright, simple, intense flavors.

And today, we start off with a classic, a shrimp pad Thai, followed by another favorite, Thai cashew chicken.

And then one of my favorite stir fries because it's so simple and so quick and so delicious.

It's one made with pork, basil, chilies and garlic.

So please stay tuned as we take a culinary tour of Bangkok.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - Introducing Hestan ProBond.

Crafted from the resilience of cold-forged stainless steel, we collaborate with top chefs to redefine cookware and the kitchen experience.

Italian craftsmanship meets innovation with Hestan ProBond.

- Pad Thai, it used to be something that we eat all day, but because of how rich pad Thai is, because it contain noodles, vegetables, very strong, saucy sauce, this kind of thing with the egg, you usually will have it when you have crab for it.

But it's very special.

It's still a special dish, pad Thai.

For the first bite of pad Thai, for someone that never tried, they will feel the layer of punch, of sweetness, sour-y, salty, crunchy, the tenderness of noodles.

There's so many variety we're seeing today of how people adapting to ways to make their pad Thai.

Some adding the condiments first.

Some people starting with the noodle first, because they want their noodle to be soft and tender.

- (speaking Thai) - (speaking Thai) - (speaking Thai) Then we put all the ingredients inside.

Add some noodles in.

- (speaking Thai) - (speaking Thai) - The noodles get soft already, I add my sauce.

All mixed together, maybe a little bit, wait for it to get into the noodles.

- Can you tell us what's in the sauce?

- We cannot tell the secret.

We cannot tell what's in the sauce.

- (speaking Thai) - (speaking Thai) - So in our recent travels to Bangkok, we had a lot of delicious versions of pad Thai.

So we're going to work on our sauce elements to make ours delicious here as well.

There's a few key elements-- sour, spicy, salty, and sweet that we want to work with.

So I think the safe bet first is to get equal parts of the sour, the sweet, and the salty together, and then go from there.

The first thing that I'm working with here is tamarind.

Now, tamarind grows in a pod.

It's got this kind of gelatinous membrane around the seeds inside the pod.

This is the block that you can find in a lot of grocery stores and in this block, that's basically all of that material around the seed, but it also has some of the membrane and some of the seeds in there.

So that's a little tougher to work with.

But it is the pure thing, it's the real deal.

We also can find a tamarind concentrate or a tamarind paste in a jar.

So I'm going to start there when I'm working with this sauce.

So the next and very important element of a good pad Thai is some sweetness to it.

Now, traditionally in Thailand they would use palm sugar.

Palm sugar is made with the sap of different kinds of palm trees, but the sap from the flowers, they collect and boil down as they would maple syrup.

And it is concentrated until it becomes this really, really hard brick.

And the flavor is almost like a caramel, butterscotch-y flavor.

You can find this in the grocery store-- you've got to kind of chop it down if you're going to work with it, but I'm going to try just brown sugar.

So any good pad Thai has a little bit of spice to it, too, there's a little heat at the end.

We got a lot of choices here, you could use a fresh chili, which is gonna add a fresh burst of flavor.

Maybe stir those in at the end or even garnish with them.

Some serranos or fresno; we want to get it really spicy, I might try these Thai bird chilies, but I think I'm going to start with chili flakes because that is a really manageable amount of heat.

And I know that if I put a quarter or a half-teaspoon in something, I know how much heat I'm going to get out of it.

So I'm going to put those aside, I think, and maybe add those into our pad Thai while we put it together.

And the fourth element that is really important in a good pad Thai dish is saltiness.

We've got a couple things to work with here.

We've got soy sauce, oyster sauce has a nice amount of salt to it, it's also got a little sweetness, and fish sauce.

Now, when we were in Bangkok, we learned a lot of chefs there use dried shrimp in their pad Thai.

And Suwan, after speaking with her, she told us we don't really need to worry about that.

These add a lot of flavor, but we can get the same results with fish sauce and oyster sauce here.

I do think I need a little soy in there to really balance out the sweetness and sour of the other elements, but we'll start with a tablespoon of oyster sauce.

And same amount of soy.

So I've got equal parts of the two salty elements, the sweet element and the tart.

So I'm going to put a little of the fish sauce in there.

Probably an equal amount of that as well.

Here we go, a little... Oh yeah-- so this is a great start, but I don't feel like this tamarind concentrate is really doing the trick.

It is almost more sweet than sour.

I want a lot more tartness in there to balance the saltiness of the oyster and the fish sauce.

So I think I'm going to start a little work with the tamarind block, this paste.

Of course, any good pad Thai has other elements as well.

There's a lot of textures.

There's the noodles to think about, and there's also the vegetables that go into it.

So Bianca and I together are going to come up with a great recipe for you at home.

- It's not hard to find pad Thai here in the States, but to find the true secret of how to make it, we traveled to Thailand.

We tried so many versions all over Bangkok, one even made from a boat.

Every cook has their own secrets, of course, but we took the best of what we found and developed a version perfect for the home kitchen.

So, Wes, you talked about the flavors, the intensity of the flavors that are important in pad Thai.

- Yes, of course, the sauce itself is huge here.

We have sweet, sour, salty, spicy.

All of those elements, along with textures that we'll get into later, are what make pad Thai so incredible.

- Yes.

But there are two things that need to be done before any of the rest of the prep.

One is the tamarind.

- Yes, so the tamarind, which is pretty indispensable in pad Thai and in a lot of Thai cooking, is that sour element, that sweet and sour.

- Yes.

- If you've ever had tamarind candy, it's so good, it's a little sweet, but it makes you pucker.

- Yes, it's like a fruity pucker.

- Yeah, so that's what that provides, is a sour element.

So tamarind, you can typically find that if you look in the international aisle, you can find it, typically, in a lot of different pures that are ready.

I would stay away from them if you can because they have a lot of added sugar and other ingredients.

If you can find the pulp, it's like a big brick, and it's soft; it's like date paste.

It has pieces of the seed in there.

So to get this into a workable shape, we're just going to add some boiling water to the paste.

And we need about a third-of-a-cup.

I've got a couple of tablespoons of the paste.

And what this will do will loosen the paste up.

I'll just stir it and mash it around.

And that is going to give us this really intense tamarind pure, if you will.

- Yes.

- And we'll let that sit, and then we'll add our other elements to the sauce to this, and we'll be ready to cook.

- All right, great.

So that takes about 30 minutes to sit.

The other thing we need to do in advance is soak the noodles.

We're using rice noodles, and they don't need to be cooked in boiling water, they just need a brief soak in hot water.

Now, our water was boiling before, and we want water that is less than scalding.

So I'm just going to add a little cool water to this.

Hot water from your tap is great if that water is nice and hot.

I'm just going to stir these around a little bit so they get submerged in the hot water.

Then these will sit with the tamarind for about 30 minutes.

You want them just short of al dente.

Okay, it's been about a half hour, here are our noodles drained.

Look, they're almost bouncy and the texture that you want to think of, they're hard to pull apart, but they're soft and pliable, as you can see here.

- All right, so the tamarind as well, 30 minutes, so you can see that hot water kind of pulled all of the meat from around the seeds in there.

So I'm going to pour that through.

It's almost, like, gravy-like now.

- Yeah, look how the color changed.

- Yeah, it lightens up.

And that's why you need to use boiling water, because that really loosens up the pulp around the seeds.

- Yeah.

- So we'll just press this in a strainer, and then you can see there, there's the little seeds.

- That's beautiful.

- So I'm going to take three tablespoons out of our tamarind pure that we have now and put the sauce together so that's ready when we start cooking pad Thai.

- Great.

- So here are some of those elements I talked about earlier-- sweet, a little brown sugar.

And then we've got oyster sauce, which is going to add almost a meaty depth to it.

- Yes.

- A little sweetness and saltiness as well.

Fish sauce, which, of course, is a fermented condiment that adds tons of saltiness.

- Yes-- but briny saltiness.

Really nice.

- Briny saltiness, and more earthy flavor.

And then some soy for our salty element.

- Yes.

We also have some textural elements.

We have some chopped peanuts, which are ubiquitous throughout Thai cooking.

We have fresh bean sprouts.

Now, these are going to get tossed in at the very end.

And then we have our herbal element.

You can use scallions, you can use chives-- either way, but you want that oniony, herbal taste.

Okay, we'll just give these a quick toss together, set those aside, these will be ready for the very end.

And then we've already prepped the aromatics.

We have a little bit of minced garlic and the shallot.

And the spicy element of the sauce is the red pepper flakes.

- Yep.

- You can use fresh chilies, of course, if you want, too.

Okay, I think we're all prepped.

(chuckles) - We have two eggs.

- Eggs.

We want these beat up, right?

- Yeah.

- Just to add another dimension of flavor.

- Now, we're making a shrimp pad Thai today, but you can make chicken pad Thai, pork.

You can use any sort of protein-- tofu is great in this.

Or you could just stick with the eggs.

- Plenty of protein there.

- Yeah.

- So the next most important thing before we start stir frying is heat.

This wok, as you know, we want this screaming hot.

Don't underestimate the effect of heat on flavor.

- It's true, and while we're in Bangkok, we see all of these wonderful cooks working in these huge woks over screaming hot flames around the sides.

- Yeah.

- That is not just for show.

- That adds so much more flavor, because when you add elements to a screaming hot wok, especially the sauce, you get a little char as well.

And that adds another element of flavor.

And we'll do that with this sauce.

We'll get the most out of it when we're cooking the pad Thai by using a hot wok.

- Right, and we're going to use all the sides of the wok, not just the bottom as well, which is another reason you want it to heat up really thoroughly.

So I've got this on a high heat.

Add about a tablespoon of oil and then wait until that oil is smoking.

Look, already, you can see we're already starting to smoke a little bit, too.

Gonna just tilt this, let the oil coat all the sides.

Okay, there we go, I think we're ready.

(loud sizzling) So spread these out sort of in a single layer.

Let them get a little bit of color on them, we'll flip them once or twice.

They're going to be about maybe two-thirds cooked.

We'll take them out of the wok before they finish cooking because they go back in later.

Okay, they're getting pink, which is that you want.

Okay, there we go, I think these are just about ready to take out.

If the wok still has juices in the bottom, just wipe it out before you add more oil.

Now time for the aromatics.

The garlic, shallots, and our spicy element, red pepper flakes.

Now, this only takes about 20 to 30 seconds before we move on to adding the eggs.

That's great-- we're not trying to brown the shallots or even soften them, really.

We just want them to start releasing their aromatic deliciousness.

(sizzling) That's what you want.

A little sizzle.

Now, these will start cooking very quickly.

When the eggs are just about done, we'll add the first half of the noodles.

We're going to add the noodles in two additions because we want them to get the full effect of the hot wok.

Look at those beautiful noodles.

Okay, this looks good.

Those noodles are starting to absorb all the flavors here.

We'll add a little more oil down the sides and then the second half of the noodles.

Perfect.

Okay, this is looking really nice.

If the noodles seem a little still on the chewy side, you can add just a teensy bit of water.

Now, at this point, you can see the noodles are starting to get softer.

They will become a little more fragile and can break a little bit.

So you want to stir from the bottom and do more tossing than stirring.

- And I notice they're getting more translucent, too, as they cook.

- Great cue there.

Okay, I think we're ready to add sauce.

- Now, the best way to do this is you want to pour the sauce around the outer part of the wok.

- Right.

- The reason we do that is that hot wok will sear the sauce and add another element of flavor, a little bit of char, if you will.

- Now, the noodles are still cooking, they're absorbing the sauce.

- Yeah, it soaks right in, that's quite a bit of sauce.

Probably about a cup's worth.

- All right, I think we're almost ready.

We're going to put the shrimp back in and half of the fresh mixture there.

- Save it a little bit for the end so it's nice and crunchy and fresh.

- Yes!

So we love layering flavor.

and pad Thai is perfect for that.

Okay, there we go, it's hot and it's ready, except we just need to add the rest of that.

Just toss it in really quick or sprinkle it on top-- beautiful.

You've got some stuff to serve this with, I see.

- I do-- typical condiment here, we have some chilies and vinegar.

It's just rice vinegar, salt, and fresno chilies, which are nice and fruity.

A little pop of heat, but that vinegar will add another element to that beautiful sauce.

And, of course, a little fresh squeeze of lime at the table at the end brightens it all right up.

Mm.

- Mm.

- I love the tartness in the sauce, in that tamarind, you can really taste it.

- Yes.

- And with those rich shrimp, it's really, really good.

- That wok being hot is key; it really is another whole layer of flavor.

We brought Thailand home to you via our pad Thai with shrimp.

- So this version of Thai cashew chicken is, I can pretty much guarantee, nothing like you have had before.

It is something we found in Bangkok that was just wildly different to anything we'd ever tasted before.

It's usually pretty gloppy and sweet, more about the brown sauce than the chicken and nut flavor.

And this is anything but that.

It's light, it's bright, it's full of textures.

It's full-- a little bit of heat, which brings out the chicken flavor.

So this is a really exciting version, and it's really simple.

And we're going to start by making a slurry for the chicken.

This helps keep the chicken moist, but also adds a bit of crispness to the exterior.

Let's combine one tablespoon soy sauce, two tablespoons of water, two tablespoons all-purpose flour, quarter-teaspoon kosher salt and one teaspoon black pepper.

Here I have one-and-a-half pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs, which I've trimmed and cut into three-quarter to one-inch pieces-- now, I'm going to stir in the chicken and make sure it's coated well in that slurry; so the chicken is now coated.

So I'm gonna put it aside for a few minutes, and let's build the heart and soul of this dish, which is the sauce.

Now, the key ingredient to this sauce is a red chili paste, sometimes called red chili jam or nam prik pao.

Now, this stuff is fantastic.

It's got fried shallots, garlic, tamarind, chilies, dried shrimp, lot of stuff going on, huge flavor boost.

So look for red chili jam, nam prik pao, in the international aisle of your grocery store.

So for the sauce, I'm going to start by adding one-and-a-half tablespoons of chili paste, two tablespoons of soy sauce, one tablespoon of oyster sauce, three tablespoons of water, and one-and-a-half tablespoons of sugar.

Let's whisk it until it dissolves.

So we're adding chilies in three different ways in this recipe.

So we added the nam prik pao, the red chili jam to our sauce.

We're going to add red chili flakes later in the dish.

And here's really my favorite part of the dish: whole rbol chilies.

These add a rich, toasted chili flavor and not necessarily heat if you leave them whole.

If you break them up, that's when the seeds really add a lot of heat to the dish.

So you can skip the red rbols, but I think they add a ton of flavor to this dish.

So we're going to go ahead, we're going to toast the cashews with the chilies.

So let's add a tablespoon of oil to our pan and we're going to keep that oil till shimmering.

The toasting is going to add a ton of flavor to those cashews and the chilies.

We want to brown them to add flavor and a bit of color, but we don't want to burn them.

Once those chilies and cashews are lightly browned, slide them out of the pan.

Wipe the pan clean to make sure there's no chili seeds in there.

Now let's go ahead and cook the chicken; we're going to heat one tablespoon more oil on the pan until barely smoking.

Now we're going to go ahead and add half the chicken to the pan.

Now don't stir it too often otherwise it won't brown.

It should take two to three minutes.

Once that batch is done, slide it out of the pan and cook the remaining chicken in the same way.

You can see that the flour and the slurry is really helping brown the chicken.

Add two more tablespoons of oil to the pan, and three-quarter teaspoon pepper flakes and six minced garlic cloves.

Now, stir this mix often, otherwise it can brown quickly.

It takes about 30 seconds.

Now let's add the onion to the pan, stirring frequently, until just beginning to brown.

It takes about one to two minutes.

Now those onions have softened, but we don't want them to brown.

We still want a good bit of texture to them, because they add contrast to that chicken, which we're going to add right back in.

Now I'm going to add that sauce to the pan, and I'm going to do it just like we did with the pad Thai, which is around the outside of the pan, so it caramelizes, it doesn't dilute the flavors in the dish, caramelizes before it ever blends with the sauce.

That sauce hitting the pan smells amazing.

Now that the dish is just about done, we're going to return the cashews and chilies to the pan and stir in our scallions; we want those to just soften, but not brown.

So we left the scallions in bigger pieces, which, like the onion, add contrast to the other ingredients in the dish.

This looks and smells amazing.

And there's none of that gloppiness you typically find in this dish.

It's all about the chicken, the crisp cashews, the smoky, roasted-tasting chilies-- I got to dig in.

Grab a little rice and big spoonful of this.

Make sure I get some chilies.

This is amazing-- all the flavors are really crisp and clean, the red chili jam, the nam prik pao, adds just incredible depth.

There's a little bit of acidity from the tamarind.

The cashews also help really tone down the heat level in this dish.

So, Thai cashew chicken, delicious and easy enough for weeknight cooking.

- So I love stir fries, especially when they're big, big flavors.

And this is from Thailand.

This is pad kraprao, which means stir fried holy basil, stir fried basil with pork.

It has lots of basil in it, which is actually not fried, it's added at the end, pork and a lot of heat as well.

So let's talk about heat first of all.

We have fresno chilies.

That's what we're using for this recipe.

These Thai chilies, or bird chilies, are about ten times hotter than these.

So this is what would be used authentically, which is fine, but just be careful because they are incredibly hot.

So we have about four or five fresno chilies cut up, and we have some garlic, about six or seven garlic cloves.

And we're just going to pulse this.

We're not going to make this super fine.

We still want some pieces there.

So now we have the sauce.

I love these sauces because they have simple formulas.

And usually the formulas are, everything is equal.

So these are all one tablespoon.

We have a oyster sauce.

A good oyster sauce, by the way, is actually made from oysters, not just oyster extract.

Soy sauce.

Fish sauce, of course-- again, get a really quality fish sauce; it's been aged at least a year.

And brown sugar.

And that's a pretty standard mixture.

And then we're going to add half-a-cup of water, since it's going to a hot wok, there'll be a lot of evaporation.

So one of the things I love is the way they use a wok.

And one of the things they do is they fry eggs on the wok.

We're going to take a couple of tablespoons of oil, heat this up just till it starts to smoke.

We'll do two eggs at a time.

So a wok heats up really quickly.

So you can see we're starting to see a little smoke.

I can see the oil is starting to ripple a little bit.

Turn the heat down to medium, And these eggs are going to be reserved.

We'll do the other two eggs and we'll use them as a topping when we're finished.

You want to separate the eggs a little bit because it's easier to get them out of the pan later.

Also, depending how much oil you use, some of the hot oil can just go on top of the eggs to help cook them.

So we want a nice crispy edge, which is my idea of the perfect fried egg.

And by basting them with hot oil, you can also get the whites on top cooked.

And you still want the yolks to be runny because you want that as a topping, so I would say those are good.

That's how I like it.

So a little more oil.

Heat that up.

That's it.

Okay.

So once the eggs go in, putting it down to about a medium.

So we'll continue basting the eggs, separating them, take them out, and we'll move on in just a few minutes with the rest of the recipe.

So now we're ready to cook.

And like with any stir fry, you want everything ready because this is just going to take a few minutes.

So we're going to start with the wok.

You could use a skillet if you want.

A couple tablespoons of oil.

And we're going to get that hot.

You can see the oil is just starting to ripple.

There you go, you see a little smoke coming up.

So just a minute or two.

Now the pork goes in, and we're going to cook this for just a minute or two, we're gonna break it up.

It won't be fully cooked yet.

Okay, it's starting to break up now.

Now we're going to put in the sauce.

Now, we have just a couple of minutes.

We're going to cook this for two or three minutes.

This is holy basil.

It's very matte colored.

It's not shiny.

It has sort of a savory, more peppery flavor than Genovese-style basil.

It's not as sweet, more mentholated.

There's also a Thai basil.

This has a more licorice sort of flavor, which you could also use.

And, of course, regular Italian basil, which is going to be a little sweeter as well.

You can use this.

I would use a little bit more if you use Italian basil versus this.

So this is not a thick, syrupy sauce.

It's going to thicken a little bit.

It's still going to be sort of on the loose side.

We'll give it about another minute.

Now we have the two cups of the holy basil because you want to wilt it.

We're not going lose all that freshness.

So time to taste.

I mean, okay, this is really good.

It's clean, it's big, it's simple.

It's just everything I like in really good food.

So you can get this recipe, stir fried pork with basil, and all the dishes from this season of Milk Street at MilkStreetTV.com.

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- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - Introducing Hestan ProBond.

Crafted from the resilience of cold-forged stainless steel, we collaborate with top chefs to redefine cookware and the kitchen experience.

Italian craftsmanship meets innovation with Hestan ProBond.