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Pad Thai: Noodle is Your Lunch

What exactly is Pad Thai? And where did it come from?

By Crysta CoburnPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
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Pad Thai: Noodle is Your Lunch
Photo by Ruth Georgiev on Unsplash

This article was originally posted at Adventures in Food and Word.

I remember very distinctly sitting in a restaurant as a child with my mother and uncle in Lansing, a city with a much broader selection of world cuisine than Kalamazoo. It was a restaurant that my uncle liked for its chicken pad thai, which I had never heard of in my entire (admittedly short) life.

I knew what a chicken was and that Thai likely referred to the country of Thailand, but that was the boundary of my frame of reference. I do not recall if I ordered the chicken pad thai, but I definitely tasted it, and I was intrigued by these new flavors. The spice level was probably as low as you can order, and I remember it being surprisingly sweet.

By Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash

Thai food is not something that I eat often because my stomach can’t handle a lot of spice (or a growing list of other foods), but I often see pad thai on the menus of Asian restaurants and in recipe books as an easy dish to make. While a relatively new food, (according to multiple accounts, created less than 100 years ago), pad thai is currently a national dish of Thailand (Pad Thai: The Forgotten History of Thailand’s National Dish).

Thailand is a beautiful country that I desperately want to visit one day. It is one of the few Asian countries, and the only one in Southeast Asia, not to have been colonized by Europeans, nor was it swept up in the communist revolutions post-WWII. Thailand was also not (technically) conquered by Japan in WWII due to being allied with Japan. I have mad respect for Thailand’s ability to protect itself and its sovereignty from outsiders, even when it did, occasionally, fall into the realm of prejudice (like with pad thai). Given all that, I decided I needed to finally give this Thai national dish a try.

By Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

First, what exactly is pad thai? From Wikipedia:

Pad thai is made with soaked dried rice noodles, which are stir fried with eggs, chopped firm tofu, and flavored with tamarind pulp, fish sauce, dried shrimp, garlic or shallots, red chili pepper and palm sugar and served with lime wedges and often chopped roasted peanuts. It may contain other vegetables like bean sprouts, garlic chives, pickled radishes or turnips, and raw banana flowers. It may also contain fresh shrimp, crab, squid, chicken or other animal products. Many of the ingredients are provided on the side as condiments such as the red chili pepper, lime wedges, roasted peanuts, bean sprouts and other miscellaneous fresh vegetables. Vegetarian versions may substitute soy sauce for the fish sauce and omit the shrimp.

So pad thai is a lot like other dishes in that there are a million different recipes, and it can be tailored a bit to suit one’s tastes. My husband Greg hates seafood, for example, and I can’t eat pork. Thus, chicken was my obvious meat of choice. Pad thai is easily made gluten free, just be sure to check the box of noodles and make sure it says “gluten free” in case they were made on equipment shared with wheat noodles.

Click here for a Pad Thai With Shrimp (Gluten Free) recipe.

Click here for Gluten Free Super-Easy Chicken Pad Thai recipe.

And here is a Gluten Free Authentic Pad Thai recipe.

And, of course, Vegan Pad Thai.

I told you there are a ton of recipes out there, and these are just a very tiny selection. Feel free to mix and match as I did, and freeze the leftovers for a quick and easy dinner some other night when you are short on time.

By Dave Kim on Unsplash

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, please click on my profile to see what else I have been up to.

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About the Creator

Crysta Coburn

Crysta K. Coburn has been writing award-winning stories her whole life. She is a journalist, fiction writer, blogger, poet, editor, podcast co-host, and one-time rock lyrics writer.

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