Hi! It’s Pepper here with a recipe from my new book, The Pepper Thai Cookbook, which is available in the Cravings shop now. This twist on pad see ew uses dried bow-tie pasta for those who have trouble sourcing Thai wide rice noodles. I hope you love it!
One question people ask me all the time on Instagram is how to make pad see ew. It’s a good question! Whenever we order takeout from one of the many excellent Thai restaurants in LA, we almost always order pad see ew, the good kind where the sweet soy has caramelized just right and soaked into the chewy pan-fried noodles. But a common problem is that in many places I’ve lived, it’s not easy to find the Thai wide rice noodles. What to do then? The solution came to me one day when I was thinking about spaghetti. Dried spaghetti noodles are very popular in Thailand these days, and people use them in all kinds of traditional stir-fry dishes. So why not other kinds of pasta? After a few experiments, I discovered that super-market bow-tie pasta made a good substitute for pad see ew noodles. The bow-tie shape helps them soak up the sweet dark soy sauce (try my homemade recipe if you can't find it at the Asian market!) in their little folds and wrinkles, and when cooked al dente they end up perfectly chewy- tender after being cooked in the very hot wok. Even if this “pad see ew” is not exactly the same as takeout, I am proud of my noodle innovation. Feel free to enter my name for the Nobel Prize this year, thank you.
Reprinted from The Pepper Thai Cookbook. Copyright © 2021 by Vilailuck Teigen with Garrett Snyder. Photographs copyright © 2021 by Jenny Huang. Published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Random House.