I followed SheSimmers' recipe fairly closely with the following modifications:
- Used soy sauce instead of fish sauce in the sauce (oh my thats a lot of sauce in one sentence). Mostly because I didn't want to buy another bottle of fish sauce for Ajax when I had a lot leftover back downtown. For future iterations, I'll use a 1:1 ratio of soy to fish sauce.
- Used brown sugar instead of palm sugar, and Chinese rock sugar instead of brown sugar in the sauce. Not a good idea since it took forever to melt the rock sugar. For future iterations, I'll probably keep the brown sugar sub but use honey or whatever unrefined sugar I pick up at Bulk Barn for the rest of the sweetener.
- Didn't use shrimp, so I was mostly left on my own to figure out the timing of how long to cook the noodles for. My impression from reading her recipe is that there's real danger of overcooking the noodles, which did not turn out to be the case (perhaps I bought a different kind of rice noodles?). In fact I had the opposite problem of the noodles taking a long time to cook through. I needed to add extra water at the end and steam the noodles for a bit with the lid on to soften the noodles to al-dente.
- Used more chives and also cooked it and the bean sprouts since I don't like raw veggies too much. Sticking with this method for future iterations.
- Used onions instead of shallot, because too much trouble to stock another allium.
- Cut the salted preserved radish into strips instead of a fine dice since it's easier to pick up along with the noodles.
- I like a ton of chopped peanuts (and the juice of an entire quarter of lime cause sour = my preferred dominate flavour in pad thai) as garnish. Bonus for using spicy peanuts.
Here's a handy pictorial guide of my version:
The black numbers are the cooking order. Let me be proud of my mise, it makes cooking so much easier when you can just grab containers and dump its entire content in. Kenji is always right in you can never have too many metal bowls.
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