We do offer gluten free cooking classes! Lately, our in person class in Bangkok has had a lot of inquiries from people who want to learn how to make delicious, gluten free Thai food. As many of those guests have found, we’re ready to talk with you in detail about Thai ingredients, recipes, and food culture that make it possible to enjoy even with strict dietary restrictions.
Thinking Healthier Post Pandemic
The pandemic has made us all a little more health conscious. We’ve used the down time to reformat our classes and our cooking space. First off, we’ve converted our main cooking class to a plant based format. This means most of the ingredients we use in each cooking session are vegetarian or vegan. Also like a lot of people looking to destress over the past few years, we’ve expanded our garden space. So much so, that our guests often remark that it looks like a jungle! Our little urban jungle is full of edible plants that are local and less well known by newcomers to Thai food such as pandan, long pepper, and wild betel leaves. It isn’t a coincidence that these two things go together, as we teach we encourage others to be more mindful about what’s on our plates, where it comes from, and how it impacts our personal health, and the health of our local environments.
Gluten Free Thai Food
Going plant based helps us accommodate people interested in gluten free cooking, or who have other dietary requests and restrictions. But helping people who may struggle to find classes in Bangkok that can accommodate them also gives us an opportunity to highlight the versatility of Thai cuisine and ingredients. For example, there are many great dishes that rely on gluten free staples such as rice noodles. This means with the exception of some of the sauces included, dishes such as pad thai and pad see ew already lend themselves well to gluten free cooking!
This version of pad thai is made traditionally but is vegetarian, gluten free.
This is good news for everyone, whether they may be avoiding wheat due to a serious allergy, or a dietary preference. We would love to encourage you that, although you have to be persistent about asking about ingredients, there are still plenty of things to safely feast on and cook in Thailand. Since wheat only began making appearances in Thai dishes fairly recently, much of local, traditional Thai food may already be gluten free. Out tip? Be careful to ask about the sauces used to season food, which may contain wheat. You can always prepare a short script to explain your diet before your trip and have it translated. We’ve even seen some travelers bringing their own gluten free seasoning to restaurants!
If you’ve got a question about booking a class, please use our contact page to reach out to us. As always, thank you for your support!
Good news for our cooking class students, we’re upgrading our most popular recipes with new, downloadable cards to help you prepare to cook with us. Each of the cards features fun illustrations from a local Thai artist, aimed at helping you remember exactly which ingredients you need to buy. This means shopping for your favorite Thai meals like pad see ew noodles, green curry, and tom yum soup is now even easier. You’ll be able to jump into our virtual cooking classes, hosted on zoom, knowing you’re fully prepared with all of your ingredients.
Each of the recipe cards feature illustrations to help you remember the most important ingredients to grab when shopping.
We know shopping for ingredients can be intimidating. In some stores even the aisle for soy sauce and fish sauce can seem endless and overwhelming. To complicate matters, some people may be dependent on online deliveries during the pandemic and need to make sure they’re purchasing the correct ingredients. We hope the recipe cards will make this process easier, helping you find the right ingredients for tasty renditions of your favorite Thai foods.
You can find the recipe cards in our virtual courses, like our Thai Cooking Class Starter Kit, with lots of supplementary info on ingredients. For example, a key ingredient for our Pad Thai recipe is tamarind. However, the tamarind you find in the stores comes in many formats, and we have had guests purchase sweet tamarind, instead of the sour tamarind pulp needed. The information we provide in the virtual courses (which are smartphone responsive for access on the go) and the downloadable shopping cards for the recipes should help prevent these mistakes.
Each live cooking session includes access to our virtual courses where you can download the recipe cards and find supplementary information on many of the most common ingredients. We plan to add notes on which kitchen utensils will be most helpful when making Thai cuisine.
If you don’t already have access to a virtual course, you can purchase it, or receive access when you sign up for a zoom cooking course through Airbnb. In addition to these recipes we do take other requests in our private classes. If you’re planning a large cooking session or corporate learning activity, we would be happy to help.
As these course choices become more popular we will continue to add more recipe cards to new dishes and do our best to help you navigate cooking your favorite Thai dishes.
Credit: Special thanks to graphic designer Yui for all of her hard work helping to beautifully illustrate so many of these Thai ingredients!
Like so many of you, we are stuck indoors lately because of quarantine guidelines. As a social enterprise offering face to face cooking classes in Bangkok, we’ve mostly been shut down as tourism has been crippled since late February. However, we’re still doing what we can to support our community, and today we’d like to make your day brighter with some of our favorite, easy to do Thai recipes.
When we think about quick and versatile recipes, fried rice is pretty high in the ranks. You can adapt any ingredients you want, add pretty much any protein, and it’s unctuous and familiar enough to please the entire family. Even seasoning is easy. This recipe keeps it simple, using only soy sauce which is often already in your kitchen cabinet.
Let’s have at it, but to kick things up a notch we’d like to suggest the extra option of using a Thai curry paste in your recipe. The paste will lend color, spice, and excitement to the regular old fried rice you’ve made one too many times in the first few weeks of quarantine.
150g of the protein of your choice (chicken or tofu work great)
1 cup of cooked rice
2 cloves of garlic minced
4 small shallots (or 2-3 tbsp of other diced onion)
3 tbsp soy sauce
1 egg
1/2 cup of vegetables (Your choice. Thai eggplants are great if you have them but even frozen or canned vegetable mixes also work)
Optional: A handful of sweet basil (about half a cup, Italian basil can be substituted)
How to Make Green Curry Fried Rice
Start by washing and slicing everything. For your tougher herbs and veggies, get a rolling bowl going in a pot so they can be blanched. Blanch, cool, and set aside.
Tap some oil into your pan and toast your curry paste until fragrant.
Add your protein of choice, stirring over medium heat until brown. For tender proteins like shrimp, cook and set aside. Also remember you can add a little water or stock if your curry gets too dry.
As your proteins mostly cooked, add aromatic herbs and vegetables. This is the best time, for example, to add garlic, shallots, diced carrots, mushrooms, or other veg of your choice. Let your meat finish cooking, and vegetables become tender and covered in curry paste before proceeding.
Add your rice and mix. When making more than one portion, be careful not to add so much rice that you overfill your wok.
Add your soy sauce. Stir, taste, and adjust if needed.
Maneuver your fried rice to one side of the pan, leaving space to crack your egg. Tilt the pan so the side with the egg is directly over the heat and scramble.
Once the egg is cooked, mix with the rest of your rice. Add a handful of sweet basil and turn off the heat.
Stir until the basil wilts, and serve.
Siblings racing to make pork meatballs for their Thai soup.
Thai Pork Ball Soup (Thom Jeud)
Often this warming soup is one of the first defenses when you’re not feeling well. The soup varies from one Thai household to the next, so there are endless varieties. Use that knowledge as license to take some liberties with the recipe, making use of what you have on hand. We make and fill the soup with pork balls, but you can use chicken or create a vegetarian version. Finally, the soup reheats well and can be either a side dish in a fantastic meal or the main dish itself.
Soup Ingredients (serves 4)
1 liter of chicken or pork stock (about 4 cups)
1 cup of chopped cabbage
1 large carrot, sliced bite sized
1 packet of egg tofu, sliced
2 tbsp of soy sauce
Meatball Ingredients
400g minced pork
⅓ cup of carrot diced small
1 cup of chopped glass noodles
2 stalks of chopped spring onions (remember to set a tbsp or so aside to use as a garnish when serving)
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
½ tsp palm sugar
You can use minced chicken instead of pork, and we make vegetarian versions of this soup too!
How to Make Thai Pork Ball Soup (Thom Jeud)
Prep your vegetables. You can blanch carrots or other tough vegetables in advance to save time. (To make the soup extra filling parboiled potatoes are a hearty addition).
Slice your glass noodles small.
Mix glass noodles, spring onion and your chopped carrots with the pork in a bowl.
Season with oyster sauce, fish sauce, palm sugar, and soy sauce then make small meatballs
Boil your stock.
Add your meatballs, and when mostly cooked, add your carrot, cabbage, any other veg.
As they soften, lower the heat and add 2 tbsp of soy sauce. If this doesn’t seem like much seasoning remember your meatballs will be contributing lots of flavor to the soup as well.
Taste and add more soy sauce as needed.
Finally, add your egg tofu, turn off the heat, and stir gently.
Garnish with remaining spring onion before serving.
Time for a favorite from our kids and families class!
Kid’s Pad Thai with Instant Noodles
Finally we can’t forget about the kids. They’re home and seemingly always hungry. Take them on a journey in the kitchen using basic ingredients. This is a departure from a more typical pad thai, but we make it often for our Courageous Kitchen kids and everyone loves it!
Stir frying is a quarantine cook’s best friend. When you can throw everything you’re cooking up in one wok, all your dish washers will be pleased as well. So grab your biggest non-stick pan and get ready to make one of Thailand’s most loved noodle stir fries!
1 handful of blanched Chinese kale, broccoli, or the veg of your choice
A small handful of bean sprouts (can omit or substitute with micro-greens)
2 tbsp of pad thai sauce
1 tbsp of oil for stir frying
How to Make Pad Thai for Kids
Blanch any vegetables you want to add by dipping into boiling water for a few minutes (for Chinese kale this usually takes about one minute in boiling water).
Remove from the boiling water and add to ice water to stop the vegetables from cooking, and preserve the fresh color.
Use the same boiling water now to quickly boil your noodles. Most instant noodles will only take 1-2 minutes to become soft. Set aside.
Add oil to your wok or non stick pan. Follow with your chicken and cook until the color changes.
Add your vegetables to your cooked chicken, along with tofu. Stir quickly to heat the vegetables up.
Now add your cooked instant noodles and mix well.
Add bean sprouts and your pad thai sauce.
Mix everything and push to the side of the pan, away from the heat. In the hot portion of the pan crack and scramble your egg, stirring vigorously until cooked.
Once the egg is cooked, mix with all of the other ingredients and turn off the heat.
Stay safe and eat well during this extended quarantine period. While we hope everything gets back to normal soon, we’ll continuously be thinking about new ways to share our love of people and compassion for communities with you online in days to come.
Hey parents! Welcome to the Courageous Kitchen, we’ve got a fun recipe to share with you today. If you haven’t been on our site before, we’re a charity helping marginalized youth in Bangkok, and funded by guests taking our cooking classes and tours. Today we’re taking Thailand’s iconic pad thai recipe from our classes, keeping the dish’s Thainess intact, while making it fun for kids (and easy for parents).
When you book our cooking class, it funds fun, educational learning and food supplies for those in need.
One of the classes we offer is a cooking class for kids and families, and pad thai is often a favorite of our visitors. However if we want everyone to enjoy their own plate of pad thai, we’ll usually have the parents making a traditional pad thai recipe, but do a simplified version for the kids using instant noodles. So today’s recipe has been battle tested both with the refugee kids we serve as a charity, and with many of you who stop by during your travels in Bangkok to support us.
Why is Cooking Pad Thai so Difficult?
We make a lot of pad thai with our guests, so you can be sure we’ve tested and retested this recipe!
For those unfamiliar, pad thai is the iconic Thai dish most famous as the ambassador of Thai food to countries in the west. For example in the US, newcomers to the cuisine often make this steamy hot plate of noodles their first stop. The sticky noodles are delicious when hot, eye pleasing, especially when decorated with shrimp, and unlike some Thai dishes, not going to burn you with spice.
Pad Thai recently made our list of Thailand’s best noodle dishes, but we must admit recreating a delicious version at home is a challenge. This is largely because of ingredients that are hard to find, or misunderstood. When you search the internet you also have a barrage of recipes, many of which look and taste nothing like the delicious plates you may have tried in Thailand.
For newcomers to Thai food, pad thai can be a friendly landing spot, because the dish combines well with seafood, and isn’t too spicy.
Today we want to offer you an easy pad thai recipe, that’s appropriate for kids and really tasty. To make it we’ve omitted much of the long list of ingredients, including components like the toasted peanut garnish, which many children may have an allergy to anyway.
Your focus, instead of giant shopping list of exotic ingredients, is instead on making a delicious sauce. If you can master the sauce below, that’s half the victory already claimed! Later we’ll stir fry it with instant noodles, but if you keep some of your soon-to-be-famous pad thai sauce stocked, it can be an easy dish to whip up in a pinch.
Kid’s Pad Thai Sauce Recipe
Enjoy this easy pad thai recipe, suitable for kids and adults alike. We recommend cooking it as a family!
Ingredients
This sauce recipe is enough for 4-5 portions of noodles. If you’re happy with the first round, make it in a larger batch and keep refrigerated for whenever pad thai cravings may strike.
1 cup tomato ketchup
Tip: Unlike sour tamarind juice, this is likely already available in your fridge!
1 cup water
1/4 cup white sugar
Tip: If you’re using another type of sugar such as palm, agave, or natural sugar, simply add to taste.
1/4 cup fish sauce
Tip: Go meatless and substitute in high quality salt or soy sauce to taste.
1/3 cup vinegar
1 tsp paprika
Instructions
Grab a non-stick pan and put it on low heat.
Add all of your ingredients, mix, and reduce on low for 30 minutes.
Remember to stir as it reduces, and when ready, it should be thick enough to easily coat any type of noodles you use.
Allow to cool and store in the fridge. If refrigerated, this easy pad thai sauce should last a few weeks.
Tip: Use the sauce for other things! If you’re happy with the sauce and the kids like it, use it for whatever suits you. Dip chicken nuggets, use to flavor your kid’s fried rice, or instead of plain ketchup on french fries.
Kid’s Pad Thai Recipe
This kid’s pad thai recipe was built for a tested with kids. Typical pad thai can be heavy on seafood, peanuts, and other ingredients children may have allergies to eating.
Ingredients
1 pack of instant noodles
Tip: The size of the noodle packs may vary by brand, but typically they are 60-80g per pack. That’s filling portion for kids 9 and up, so adjust as necessary.
100g chicken
50g tofu, chopped into small squares
1 egg
1 handful of blanched Chinese kale, broccoli, or the veg of your choice
Small handful of bean sprouts
2 tbsp of pad thai sauce
1 tbsp of oil for stir frying
1 lime
Tip: Our kids don’t like lime. Do yours? If so, make this an optional garnish, along with a few more bean sprouts on your child’s plate!
Using instant noodles instead of rice noodles isn’t a mistake! The instant noodles cook fast, are less sticky, and are easier for children to gather on their forks. Remember to cut or chop them even smaller for young kids.
Instructions
Blanch any vegetables you want to add by dipping into boiling water for a few minutes (for Chinese kale this usually takes about one minute in boiling water).
Remove from the boiling water and add to ice water to stop the vegetables from cooking, and preserve the fresh color.
Use the same boiling water now to quickly boil your noodles. Most instant noodles will only take 1-2 minutes to become soft. Set aside.
Add oil to your wok or non stick pan. Follow with your chicken and cook until the color changes.
Add your vegetables to your cooked chicken, along with tofu. Stir quickly to heat the vegetables up.
Now add your cooked instant noodles and mix well.
Add bean sprouts and your pad thai sauce.
Mix everything and push to the side of the pan, away from the heat. In the hot portion of the pan crack and scramble your egg, stirring vigorously until cooked.
Once the egg is cooked, mix with all of the other ingredients and turn off the heat.
The same way we simplified the recipe for kids, you can easily upgrade with a squeeze of lime, sauteed shrimp, chili flakes, or another protein of your choice.
Now that you’ve mastered the sauce, you’re ready to get to the stir frying. Once your ingredients are prepared, this should go rather quickly. Follow the instructions below, and remember not to feel as though you can’t improvise the recipe to slip in more veggies, or even to omit meat in the dish entirely.
Thanks for trying out the Courageous Kitchen recipe for kid’s pad thai. We hope you have an opportunity to cook it together as a family, and enjoy a taste of Thailand wherever you are around the world. Please take a moment to get to know us better, by following our food and charitable adventures on facebook and instagram. As always, happy cooking!
We’re lining up our favorite plates of Thai noodles to discuss their origin, ingredients, and sometimes complicated names. This list includes the best noodles that you’ll find stir fried, or served in curry or gravy broth at restaurants in Bangkok or around the country. If you’re a fan of Thai food, read on to learn all about the noodle dishes you should be ordering!
1. Pad Thai ผัดไทย
Undeniably, pad thai is the most popular Thai dish outside of Thailand.
First, let’s talk vocabulary. The Thai word pad, pronounced ‘phat’, means to vigorously mix over heat. You’ll see this word often in the rest of this article, and when you see it on the menu at your favorite Thai place, you’ll know instantly which dishes are the stir fries. At the top of the list of Thailand’s most popular noodle stir fries is pad thai. Pad thai is easily the most well known Thai dish outside of Asia, but like the flavors of the dish, the history behind these tamarind tinted noodles is complicated.
The second word, thai, referring to the Thainess of the dish is equally is telling. For all the hoopla about authenticity, it turns out pad thai is a fairly recent addition to the Thai food canon. The dish came to fame thanks to a nationalism push, and is seasoned with anti-Chinese sentiment. Long story short, the invented dish may have served to get more Thais cooking their own street food, but isn’t as popular today, as you might imagine.
A homemade plate of pad thai with jumbo shrimp.
Not the traditional Thai dish you thought? There’s no shame in finding out you’ve been loving a propaganda plate, most of us have! To make matters worse, finding a delicious plate of pad thai in Bangkok is indeed a challenge. The number of ingredients makes it prohibitive to cook with rising food costs, and there are few deterrents to using recipe shortcuts, like ketchup, to improve the taste, color, and shelf life of the renown dish. Add on top disappearing street food culture, and you’ll begin to understand why the quality of the dish varies so widely in Thailand.
There’s certainly more to say about pad thai! We have our own pad thai recipe and would be happy to dive deeper into the nuanced dish in a future cooking class in Bangkok or San Diego.
2. Kanom Jin ขนมจีน
Fermented rice noodles, called kanom jin, piled with spicy ‘nam kati’ fish curry.
Thais don’t eat pad thai on a regular basis. For their regular lunch and dinner choice, the nation-state turns to a curry noodle dish called ‘kanom jin’ (often written as khanom chin). These noodles lack the international glory many of the others on this list enjoy, but they are by far the most popular domestically.
To enjoy the noodles, simply pour your choice of curry over the top. The most common options include green curry, and the less well known, extremely spicy yellow curry called ‘nam ya kati’. After picking a curry, you top the noodles with the fresh condiments you prefer, often situated on a communal table. The condiments are a mix of ingredients intended either to enhance the flavor, such as lemon basil, or more commonly to aid in the digestion of the oft spicy dish, such as bean sprouts or bitter melon.
Traditional Thai fermented noodles (kanom jin), with many of the most common condiments, served with them (clockwise): bean sprouts, cucumber, lime, lemon basil, long bean, and pickled mustard greens.
KJ noodles aren’t devoid of geopolitical implications either. The dish is often mistakenly translated directly as ‘Chinese snack’. The irony of this lazy translation is that it implies these ethnic noodles originate elsewhere. Only the opposite is true, the noodle made of fermented rice, may be the oldest of those eaten widely by people in South East Asia.
3. Mama Noodles มาม่า
Instant noodles have made a formidable impact on the Thai diet! Try them when you’re exploring Bangkok’s street food scene.
We would be remiss not to mention, that a close runner up for the most popular domestic noodle is one that you may not expect— instant noodles! Much of the popularity of these ubiquitous noodles is due to their price and availability. With the second highest number of 7-11 convenience stores in the world, Thailand’s convenience addiction makes finding a wide variety of instant noodle brands, types, and flavors easy all over the country. The most popular of those choices being the brand named ‘Mama’ noodles.
The brand is so popular that in the context of food, ‘mama’ is almost always a reference to those iconic crinkly noodles, paired with a seasoning pack. There are restaurants in Bangkok popular for serving suped up versions of the noodles with every topping you can imagine— including jumbo seafood. But the noodles also appear in popular Thai dishes made in a hurry at street food stalls.
Tom yum soup with ‘mama’ brand instand noodles is a hit with kids and adults alike! We recently made it for our hungry student musicians.
Since they’re so easy to cook, some Thai street food stalls’ entire existence is customizing instant noodle dishes for customers with bonus protein items like hot dogs, poached eggs, minced pork, or the seafood of your choice! You won’t find them often on the menu in fancier restaurants, but you can be assured of their popularity among the Thai populace, whether they be school children, working class, or hungry party goers.
Next up is a stir fry dish, iconic for the color of the wide rice noodles used. Pad see ew gets it’s brown tinted noodles from ‘see ew’, which is Thai for soy sauce. But to get your noodles the correct distinctive color, you can’t use just any run of the mill soy sauce. You’ll need to find what Thais refer to as ‘see ew dam’, or dark soy sauce. This particular sauce stands out because of its bitter taste and deep black color. In fact, the sauce is mostly molasses and only a small percentage soy, so be careful when throwing it into your wok, as it’s potent enough to really alter the flavor of a dish.
Pad see ew is the stir fry on this list with the strongest link to Chinese influence. The dark soy sauce, the use of Chinese kale, and the stir fry (aka Chinese wok hei style cooking) cooking method are a sure thumbprint of the migration of centuries of Chinese cooks to Thailand. This means you can find the dish being served in Bangkok street food stalls, which almost pre-date the existence of pad thai. Around the region, you can even find similar dishes in other countries, like Malaysia’s char gway teeo noodles (often spelled char kway teow).
Our favorite part of this popular Thai dish are the noodles themselves. Thais typically make the dish by flash stir frying fresh rice noodles, which begin to meld together from the intense heat, as well as absorbing the stir fry sauces and smoke from the wok. After emerging from the hot wok the plate of noodles is dusted with chili flakes and black pepper, but it may surprise you that this isn’t a spicy dish. The relative mild amount of spice heat makes it an approachable dish for newcomers to Thai cuisine, and a common runner up to pad thai for popularity outside of Thailand.
5. Pad Kee Mow ผัดขี้เมา
Take away pad see ew’s egg, and add ingredients to intensify the spice, and behold, you have the famous Thai dish known as pad kee mow, or drunken noodles.
You can’t really talk about pad see ew without bringing up the spicier Thai cousin, pad kee mow. In English these noodles can often be referred to as ‘drunken noodles’, a direct translation from the Thai term ‘kee mow’, meaning someone who is regularly drunk. Alternatively, this could be a reference to dousing the noodles in dark soy sauce, but that isn’t nearly as fun an explanation.
This hangover busting dish is a favorite of mine, because it is a Thai spice lover’s departure from the humble, mildly flavored grand-cestor pad see ew. While you can find similar dishes to pad see ew around the region, this chili fueled plate of noodles is uniquely Thai. So while many will overlook ‘kee mow’ for a calm and delicious pad thai or pad see ew plates, hot headed spice lovers will come to Thailand, and make the version found at Bangkok’s street food vendors their new favorite Thai noodle dish.
Young green peppercorn, kaffir lime leaf, and fingerroot make this dish uniquely Thai!
What makes pad kee mow so spicy? This heat level doesn’t come from fresh chili alone, but layers of different types of spice. In addition to Thai birds’ eye chili, you have the larger Thai chilis added for color and their mild flavor. But what stands out most is the addition of fingerroot, a gangly root that is more intense than the galangal that flavors your favorite tom yum soup. The fingerroot is paired with intensely peppery, mildly bitter young peppercorn, and together they give the dish a mouth and face numbing type of spice that makes it perfect for the ailing drunk!
With Chiang Mai becoming an increasingly popular destination, the popularity of khao soi is growing rapidly.
Visitors to Chiang Mai need no introduction to khao soi noodles. Enjoying the creamy curry noodles has become synonymous with visiting the city itself, because a delicious bowl can be troublesome to find or make elsewhere. This is because the noodles are often misunderstood, and have been reinvented several times based on the influx of people in the highlands of south east asia.
Whether you credit the Burmese, Chinese muslims, or some other group with khao soi, a quick taste or glance at the ingredient list is enough to tell you the origin isn’t Thai. The name comes from the Burmese word for noodles, but the current version most popular with tourists looks little like the dishes of the past. Many of the oldest recipes call for the richly spiced curry, reminiscent of Indian or middle eastern curries, and pair the flavor with red meat.
There may be great debate about the origin of khao soi, but the popularity of the dish is undeniably. The mild amount of hot chilies and meaty broth make it appealing to foreigners who fall in love with the dish in their stints in Thailand’s largest northern city. Today you’ll find the most celebrated versions served with chicken, and garnished with fried noodles, pickled shallots, lime, and mustard greens.
7. Khao Piak ข้าวเปียก
This thickened rice noodle called ‘khao piak’ makes for an extremely satisfying bowl of noodles.
The least well known of our favorite noodle dishes is surely ‘khao piak‘ (pronounced KOW bie-ek). Even the wikipedia page on this hearty bowl of rice noodles looks skinny on info! But that doesn’t mean you should be in the dark about these tasty, usually handmade noodles. If you translate the name literally, khao means rice and piak (BIE-ek) means wet. Now wet rice doesn’t sound too appetizing unless you know it’s a reference to the noodles being made of rice flour and tapioca starch, and served in a gravy like broth.
Lately, the little known noodles are having a resurgence, thanks to the increasing popularity of Laotian food, where the dish is often referred to as ‘khao piak sen‘. The country of Laos shares a border with Thailand, and a long history of trade, war, and blending of language, culture, and cuisine. As Thailand has become one of the wealthiest and most developed nations in the region, often the influence of Laotian cuisine get left out of the explanation of dishes that people may assume are authentic Thai recipes, such as papaya salad.
In our outreach program, youth at risk have an opportunity to learn how to make their own rice noodles for dishes like ‘khao piak. ‘
Whether you’ve had them on the Thai or Lao side of the border no matter, this is a special, extra satisfying meal. They’ll make you nostalgic for a hot bowl of chicken noodle soup, except they’re better. When the rice noodles are added to a richly seasoned pork or chicken broth, the starch in them thickens the soup into a flavorful gravy. Since they’re so filling, even families with few resources can stretch this dish into a meal!
Thai Noodle Vocabulary Review
pad – ‘phat’ – stir fry
kee mow – a drunkard
pad kee mow – drunken noodles
kanom jin (pronounced ‘ka-nom jeen’) – fermented rice noodles
see ew – soy sauce
see ew dam – dark soy sauce
sen yai – wide rice noodles
khao piak – literally wet rice, a reference to making the noodles by adding boiling water to rice flour
