The Secret to Better Pad Thai Is Just 3 Ingredients

What is Pad Thai Sauce?

Pad Thai sauce is a stir-fry sauce used to flavor the popular pad thai stir-fry noodle dish from Thailand.

A Pad Thai recipe is prepared with flat rice noodles, and besides the sauce, other ingredients are added.

Egg, tofu, and shrimp are popular Pad Thai protein additions. Modern, but not traditional, chicken pad thai can be flavored with this pad thai sauce too!

The sauce is thin and sticky, prepared with only a few handfuls of ingredients.

Today in Thailand, Pad Thai sauce is prepared with tamarind paste, palm sugar, and fish sauce.

These ingredients create the basic salty, sour, and sweet flavor concoction that we love in our Pad Thai. The sauce itself can be prepared during the noodle dish cooking process.

Yet, stocking up and making a bigger batch, which will last for a handful of Pad Thai dishes in the future and a few months, is completely worth it.

It will speed up your cooking process, and the flavors in the sauce will be already perfectly adjusted.

Ingredient Notes

This sauce includes 3 ingredients, which are all the essential ingredients used in a proper Pad Thai sauce in Thailand.

Tamarind Paste – Adding sweet sourness. You can use Thai or Vietnamese tamarind. Indian tamarind paste is not the best choice because it's a thick sour paste, while Thai tamarind paste is sweeter and more liquid and like a concentrated liquid. Besides, Thai tamarind is sweeter than Indian tamarind. Nonetheless, if you can only get Indian tamarind paste, you can use that too. The pad thai sauce will turn out a bit more sour and thicker.

Cane/Palm Sugar – Adding sweetness. Various cane and palm sugar types exist across the world. They come in a block, cone, or crumble. It's easier to use crumbled ones, but the quality of cane or palm sugar in dense blocks or cones tends to be better. Try to use only Asian cane or palm sugar, but if you can't, you can use south and Central American palm or cane sugar too.

Fish Sauce – Adding saltiness Many fish sauce brands exist out there. Go for a popular Thai fish sauce of your liking.

Tip: It's easier to scoop out to season your dish when it's thin, but you can store more in a jar to save fridge space when it's thick.

Anything else added to the sauce is a derivation or a so-called PadThai-style sauce or a non-authentic Pad Thai dish.

Families in Thailand and regions in Thailand will have a few additions to their pad thai sauce, such as chopped garlic, onion, or green onions.

Not that I don't enjoy these western-style Pad Thai dishes—I love them. However, let's just face it, for a basic sauce, you don't need any other ingredients!

The High Heel Gourmet explained this really well in her Pad Thai trilogy, and she also shares some useful historical background and debunks some wrong beliefs surrounding this iconic Thai dish.

Her perspective regarding Thai food is in line with other Thai folks, which I met in my travels.

Process Overview

Step 1

Place tamarind paste, palm or cane sugar, and fish sauce in a non-stick saucepan.

Heat up over a medium-to low-heat setting and stir.

Step 2

The ingredients should be melting. Stir and keep it over a lower heat setting.

Step 3

Reduce to desired consistency and store in a jar or use directly in your food preparation.

Tips

To make this sauce, you will need to keep all the ingredients ready to cook them to thicken the sauce and to kill all the germs. That way you will be able to store your sauce in the fridge for a longer period of time.

A proper Pad Thai sauce is a perfect balance of sweet, sour, and salty. So, when preparing the sauce, you need to make sure that these 3 tastes are completely balanced out.

That means to taste your sauce, and if you feel it's too sour, add a tiny bit of sugar or fish sauce to balance it out. Repeat the taste test until you are satisfied.

Usually, you don't need to change the recipe if you use homemade tamarind pulp. The sauce can be a bit sourer when you use store-bought tamarind pulp. This is because they compress the tamarind all the more, so the amount of tamarind used in the sauce can be a bit off.

Storing

This Pad Thai sauce is prepared in advance by making a bigger batch. Then the sauce is stored in clean, sterilized jars and stored in a cool and dry place.

That way the sauce can be stored for months in a fridge, and you can take it out whenever you intend to prepare a Pad Thai meal.

It speeds up your cooking process so that you can prepare the Pad Thai from scratch with fresh ingredients in a timely manner.

You can also freeze them in ice cube trays to make smaller frozen batches. Once frozen, place your ice cube-shaped sauce into a Ziploc bag and store it in your freezer. Keep one out to thaw before using it in your pad thai dish.

Kitchen Tools

For this pad thai sauce recipe, I love using PFOA-free non-stick Sauce Pan pots to make this sticky sauce. That approach ensures the sauce doesn't stick to the pot.

Thickening a Pad Thai sauce without a non-stick pan can be challenging, and that burns the sauce.

Use a silicone Spatula to help you mix and pour the sauce into the jar or bottle

Make sure to always sterilize your jars/bottles by boiling them in hot water or heating the glass and lid in the oven to kill all germs. Use something like a canning kit to help you take out the hot jar and lid or to fill the jars.

Use proper glass jars with lids such as these here, or sauce bottles. The lids should be new; don't use rusted old lids. Buy new lids if required.