Fish sauce is unpleasant stuff, smelly and weird, but without it, you can’t really get the right flavor to your home made Thai or Vietnamese food. We bought one bottle of the stuff which we threw out immediately upon opening it – it was beyond weird and smelly, it was downright nasty and there was no way I was putting it in my food. The next bottle we got proved more palatable, if you can call fish sauce palatable on its own. It really is essential, though, it adds whatever that flavor is to your food that makes it taste like The Real Thing.
I’m still toying with Pad Thai recipes, I haven’t found one that works for me 100%. Some recipes call for ketchup, some for loads of Sri Racha (hot sauce), some for tamarind… Last night’s came from The Noodle Shop Cookbook
We have loads of Asian supermarkets here. I’m torn between two of them, the lush Uwajimaya that has vast quantities of beautifully stacked groceries or the ramshackle (and always freezing cold) Viet Wah where the items are a bit more mysterious, the market a bit more like being in Vietnam. At Viet Wah you can buy fresh rice noodles, at Uwajimaya you can get fresh spinach noodles, it’s not a six of one, half a dozen of the other situation. I could not find the ginger candies that I love at Uwajimaya but they don’t seem to have the ginger cookies that make me crazy at Viet Wah.
I’m a fan of supermarkets as adventure, I always love to go grocery shopping overseas and here in Seattle we’re lucky to have a nice variety of ethic grocery stores. Mystery produce is always fun, mystery meat has a slightly terrifying edge to this vegetarian inclined eater, and I get a ridiculous amount of glee from finding things in cans that I can not identify.
Eat your fish. It makes everything more interesting.
Well I’m staying tuned in for the pad thai recipe that knocks your socks off. I could use one of those. My guess is that it won’t include ketchup…
I nearly gasped after your first paragraph – there are people out there who don’t sip fish sauce like they would a nice cognac?! Okay, I know that I sound like a freak, but I LOVE fish sauce. Especially fish sauce from Phan Thiet, Vietnam. A lot of fish sauce comes from there. After spending two weeks in Mui Ne (a beach & village next to Phan Thiet), constantly smelling drying, fermenting fish, I came to deeply appreciate fish sauce.
And even though I consider myself a connoisseur, I am hopeless at pad thai. Yours looks lovely!
My weakness. All forms of Thai cuisine.
Having tried multiple cookbooks, recipes and methods, someone gave me a copy of Simply Thai Cooking, by Wandee Young & Byron Ayanoglu. The Pad Thai recipe contained within has made people think that I know how to cook! In addition to ingredients, the real differentiator with this recipe is that it describes the method to make it. You make your own tamarind sauce from tamarind paste, which is one of the secrets, and it really isn’t that difficult. I never order Pad Thai from restaurants any more, because “mine” is better.
Another suggestion is to remove the shrimps’ legs. With them, they look like cockroaches or some kind of insect. Still looking delicious though.