Authentic Pad Thai: A Process Blog-Part 3

The final product

Evening: Our pad thai is done, eaten, and much enjoyed. Here's how it went.

• I didn't make quite enough sauce, and had to add to the pot mid-cooking. I think what I will do next time is thin out the sauce (and dilute it) with some water. It was STRONG! But very yummy. It's hard to figure out if the balance between sweet, sour and salty is quite right when it's just sauce in a pot. Next time, more fish sauce (even though it made the kitchen stink), less tamarind, and about the same amount of sugar. The amount of spice was just about right too.
• One bag of noodles (I used PC brand) is enough for four servings. The ingredients from the mise en place photo will make enough for two meals, at least in our house. Knowing the hubby, he could eat the second batch now, but I'll save it for lunch tomorrow.
• Having the wok hot hot hot is the right thing to do. Everything cooks quickly, has lots of flavour from being exposed to all of that heat, and the noodles didn't have time to get mushy.
• Put lots of lime juice on top. The tamarind/sugar combination is quite thick and somewhat sweet, and it could get a bit cloying without the lime to cut through it.
• I would let the egg cook a bit more before I combined it with the rest of the ingredients next time. This time, it was a bit too spaghetti alla carbonara eggy, rather than scrambled eggy.

All in all, I'm very happy with my first try at homemade pad thai. The fun part about making it myself is that I have the ability to tweak as much as I want until I get it just the way I want it. The tweaking starts tomorrow, and once I've got it just right, time for a pad thai party!