Last week I made the Pad See Ew with Chicken recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. This is a dish Megan and I have a good amount of experience with. It’s the first Thai dish I ever ate way back in 2000 at The King and I restaurant in Greenville, SC (which I’m sure is no longer there), and it remains a favorite of ours. I’ve previously used a recipe from Rachel Cooks Thai (my saved version is from 2016, but the current page says published in 2023).
Kenji stresses the importance of fresh, wide rice noodles, just like for the Beef Chow Fun. Given my experience with that, I tried making them fresh myself. I used Hot Thai Kitchen’s Fresh Rice Noodles (ho fun) recipe, but since I don’t have a steamer I used The Woks of Life’s method of floating the pan on top of boiling water in the wok.
It went okay. I think all of the sheets came out too thick. The batter had too much surface tension to get it to spread out before putting it on the heat, and then the boiling water made it hard to tilt it with any kind of control. None of them came off the pan easily. I tried non-stick cake pans and a pyrex pie pan, and they all left a starchy film on the bottom. I don’t know if that's from being too thick, undercooking, or what.
After each one finished I stacked them using plenty of oil to keep them from sticking together, and, once they were all stacked, I sliced them into nice wide (probably too wide) noodles, and tossed with more oil to try to keep them distinct.
Kenji calls for Chinese broccoli. Our usual recipe also calls for Chinese broccoli, but we usually would go with the easier-to-acquire western broccoli. This time, though, I got Chinese broccoli for Kenji.
Kenji instructs to wash, agitate, and marinate the chicken like he does with other stir-fry recipes in the book. THe marinade is soy sauce, cornstarch, baking soda, and salt. I used my Thai Healthy Boy Mushroom Soy Sauce that I keep stocked (of the cuisines in the book, I have the most experience with Thai ingredients and cooking Thai food).
The marinated chicken gets stir-fried until cooked and the moved out. Then the Chinese broccoli is stir-fried and also moved to the bowl with the chicken.
Next an egg is fried and then broken up with garlic. The noodles are tossed in, then a sauce of light soy sauce (I used the same Healthy Boy), dark soy sauce (I used the Thai Dragonfly Black Soy Sauce that I stock almost exclusively for pad see ew), oyster sauce, and sugar. The chicken and broccoli is returned to the wok and everything is stir-fried until the sauce is absorbed and the noodles get a bit of char on them.
The end result was very good. The homemade noodles had a nice chewy texture to them, even if they were a bit big. Megan thought the dish came out oilier than we’re used to, which could be all the oil I tossed the noodles in to keep them from sticking.
I’ll definitely make this one again, but I don’t know about making the noodles again. Someday I’d like to do a taste test with the homemade noodles, store-bought like last week for the beef chow fun, and the easily available dried noodles.
I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.