Juana, author of La Cocina de Babel , takes us to Thailand with Pad Thai, a wok recipe that will open all your senses and make you feel in the middle of Asia. It is a very complete, healthy and rich in flavor recipe, and that will also give you a lot of play because, although Juana presents it with prawns, it admits many varied ingredients, you can make it with chicken, beef, tofu... Enjoy! !

For me, traveling is a necessary exercise that should be practiced many times in life. It is not only a source of pleasant sensations and beautiful moments, it is a way of opening our minds to other ways of life; it makes us more tolerant by showing us other cultures, making us aware that there is much more, and everything is perfectly valid and respectable.

Flavors and aromas of a distant country, taste sensations and simple pleasures is what you will find in pad thai, the traditional and perhaps most famous dish of the country where I want to take you, Thailand .

Thailand is the quintessential country of street cuisine. Sitting on small plastic stools around tables arranged on the sidewalks, Thais taste this and many other delicious and varied dishes, flooding the already busy streets with life.

In pad thai the basic ingredient is rice noodles that are sautéed together with various vegetables, bean sprouts, tofu, shrimp or pork and to make everything even more tempting, egg. With a slightly acidic flavor due to the use of tamarind pulp and salty due to the fish sauce (nam pla), I assure you that if you are lovers of Asian cuisine, this delicacy will not leave you indifferent.

Do we travel with the senses to Thailand?

Ken Hom carbon steel wok , Seigaiha porcelain bowls by Tokyo Design Studio and Green Cosmos stoneware plate by Tokyo Design Studio

Ingredients (for 2 people)

• 150g of rice noodles
• 1 shallot
• 1 spring onion
• 75g hard tofu
• 6 prawns
• 2 tablespoons palm sugar or brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon of concentrated tamarind
• 2 tablespoons of fish sauce
• 1 egg
• 30g bean sprouts
• vegetable oil for frying

To accompany:

• A handful of coriander leaves
• bean sprouts
• 25g of peanuts
• Chive
• 1 lime cut into quarters

Preparation

1. Put the noodles in a container with cold water and let them hydrate for about an hour.
2. Meanwhile, on a cutting board and with a sharp knife , finely chop the shallot, the onion into slices of approximately half a centimeter and the tofu into cubes of a centimeter on a side.
3. Grate the palm sugar and reserve.
4. Peel the prawns, leaving the tail on and remove the intestinal thread by making a cut with a sharp knife along the back.
5. We heat our wok until it is very hot and add a couple of tablespoons of oil where we will fry the tofu for a few minutes until it is golden; at that moment we incorporate the prawns just enough so that they take on color on both sides. Remove the tofu and prawns from the wok and reserve.
6. Heat a little more oil in the wok, add the shallot and cook for a few minutes over medium heat until it softens, taking care not to burn it. When it is soft, add the palm sugar, tamarind, fish sauce and two tablespoons of water, stirring until the sugar melts and mixes with the rest of the ingredients to form a sauce.
7. We raise the heat, drain the noodles and sauté with the sugar and tamarind sauce for a few minutes until they soften completely (if you see that there is no liquid you can add a little water).
8. Once the noodles are ready, add the reserved prawns and tofu, the spring onion, bean sprouts and mix gently. We move everything to one side of the wok and in the part that is free we put the egg that we will stir quickly with a wooden paddle to obtain a kind of scrambled egg that we will mix with the rest of the ingredients.
9. We serve immediately on a plate that we will decorate with the chopped peanuts, coriander, chives, a few more bean sprouts and lime.

Ken Hom carbon steel wok and Seigaiha Tokyo Design Studio porcelain bowl .