Vegetarian Pad Thai at Home
I love paht thai, but I rarely order it in restaurants anymore because I’m always disappointed by the oily, bland mockery they serve. Restaurant pad thai is invariably insufficiently sour, and often too sweet. Proper pad thai requires a careful balance of sweet, salty, and sour, as well as warm heat and a strong peanut flavor–two other features that are often lacking in restaurant versions of this popular dish. Traditionally, pad thai is made with salty dried shrimp and fermented fish sauce. Nancie McDermott, in her book Real Vegetarian Thai, suggests that vegetarians substitute Asian bean sauce (dao jiow), a pungent condiment made from salted, fermented soybeans. She says that either the “brown bean sauce” or “yellow bean sauce” will work fine. McDermott’s excellent cookbook includes a recipe for vegetarian phat thai that is superb, if decadent. If you’re going to eat pad thai, and don’t have any excellent Thai restaurants around, I strongly suggest making it yourself rather than settling for another mediocre mockery. Here’s Nancie’s recipe, with a few adjustments to reduce the oil content and speed up the process just a little. Read the rest of this entry »
The captious vegetarian 