I give you... HRH Pad Thai!!!

The other day I once again set out on the well-trodden path of trying to find the perfect Pad Thai.

Many times I’ve tried, and failed just as many. The taste was there, more or less. After all it’s the balance of sour (tamarind), sweet (sugar or honey) and tangy (fish sauce) that you are striving to achieve. If something's lacking, you keep tweaking it until you get it right. The tricky part is the texture! Texture of rice noodles, to be precise. Once overdone, there is not much you can do about it. Oh yes, many a soggy noodle was served to my friends in the past and I apologize for every plate that did not quite live up to the expectations. 

Never the one to give up in the face of adversity, this time I opted for thaitable.com’s recipe and followed it to a T. You can find it here: 
http://www.thaitable.com/thai/recipe/pad-thai

It just so happened that I had all the ingredients at home so I did not even have to make an emergency trip to the grocery store. With the exception of banana flower I even had all those marked as Optional and, oh boy, do they make a difference! The preserved turnip was something I had picked up, along with a bunch of other mysterious foodstuffs, at the Chinese Block 70 the last time I ventured there but forgot to ask the shop owner how to use it. Got home, opened one tiny packet (they sell 5 for 100 dinars) and, arghhh…. I called it yet another shopping mistake and relegated it to the back of the spice rack, or the spice fridge, in my case (yup, I have a fridge that houses nothing but a huge variety of spices and a wine rack). So, you can imagine how giddy I got having realized this recipe calls for the very preserved turnip. 

Still looking a bit anaemic before the addition of ground sweet paprika and roasted peanuts. 

The recipe prides itself to be THE ORIGINAL pad thai recipe which I took with a lot of reserve until I tasted the resulting dish. 

 Taste-wise, it was all there - the tangy, the sweet, the sour, the spicy… But the best part was the TEXTURE!!! Finally, the perfect combination of still toothsome rice noodles (I just pre-soaked them in cold water so they were still almost firm when I added them to the pan and perfectly al dente when the dish was done), soft tofu, crunchy vegetables. Truth be told, I did deviate from the original recipe towards the end and jazzed the dish up with some more Chinese greens. 

 As God intended it!

So.... after a long search I have finally found the Holy Grail of Asian cooking.
Too bad none of my friends I had used as guinea-pigs in my past Pad Thai endeavors was around to share my joy… and a wok full of pad thai.