Best Pad Thai Recipe with Peanut Sauce (2024)

FAQs

Why do people put peanut butter in Pad Thai? ›

A Note about Pad Thai Sauce:

I also added a big scoop of peanut butter to my sauce, because I think it gives the whole dish an added creaminess and boost of flavor that I love.

Pad Thai is a Thai noodle stir fry with a sweet-savoury-sour sauce scattered with crushed peanuts. It's made with thin, flat rice noodles, and almost always has bean sprouts, garlic chives, scrambled egg, firm tofu and a protein – the most popular being chicken or prawns/shrimp.

Carrots, broccoli, cucumbers, red peppers, and snow peas are just some of the vegetables that taste great when paired with Thai Peanut Sauce.

Thai Peanut Sauce is made up of peanut butter, soy sauce, ginger, a sweetener (I used maple syrup), rice wine vinegar, sesame seeds, a spice and water. In some more traditional versions, coconut milk is used instead of water, but I find this combination to be perfect.

While pad thai includes many nutritious ingredients, its sodium content is considerably high. You can reduce its sodium by requesting the eatery go easy on the sauce and salt-contributing condiments. If you make your own, though, you can manage the amount of ingredients and seasonings used.

The dish is mixed with a tamarind sauce and served with lime. The flavors of this dish are centered around a sweet-savory fusion. Salty, nutty, and with that slightly sweet sauce, it's a treat for tastebuds! Of course, every Pad Thai can be different.

Traditional Pad Thai usually combines tamarind paste, fish sauce, dried shrimp, and palm sugar, creating a sweet, sour, and salty taste balance. It commonly includes tofu, dried shrimp, bean sprouts, and peanuts. However, Americanized versions might swap tamarind for ketchup, making it sweeter and less complex.

Some noodle stalls in Thailand use a sweetened black soy sauce in combination with sugar, and ground dried chillies made with darkly roasted whole dried chillies, producing pad thai with a very different color and flavor balance than what Americans have become accustomed to.

Four condiments are usually provided on the table: sugar, fish sauce, chili flakes, and sliced chilies in vinegar.

Where can I use Thai peanut sauce? ›

Peanut sauce is the classic dipping sauce for chicken satay (grilled chicken skewers) and makes a delicious dipping sauce for rice paper rolls, shrimp, potstickers, tempura and fresh vegetables including cucumber slices, carrot sticks and red pepper strips.

Although commonly associated with Thai cuisine, peanut sauce actually originated in Indonesia (source). What Americans know as peanut sauce is more commonly referred to as satay sauce (or bumbu kacang) in Indonesia, because it's most often served with the popular Indonesian dish, satay (skewered, grilled meats).

Tamari and tahini have many more differences than they do similarities. Whereas Tamari comes completely from soybeans, tahini is made purely from sesame seeds. Unlike Tamari, tahini involves no fermentation. Instead, it is produced by grinding sesame seeds into a spreadable paste.

Satay sauce is a slightly spicy peanut sauce. While it's popularly associated with Thai cuisine, it's enjoyed throughout Southeast Asia and has Indonesian roots. It's best known as the sauce for satay, a tasty appetizer of marinated meat (often chicken, pork, or beef) grilled on a skewer.

Traditionally, pad Thai has flat rice noodles, bean sprouts, chicken, eggs, green onions, lime, and cilantro, along with a peanut butter-based sauce that delivers on sweet, spicy, savory, and sour flavors.

It is unknown when peanuts became a part of the Thai food system, but it is believed that foreigners brought peanuts into Thailand about 400 years ago.

Most of the peanuts in America are consumed as peanut butter, a form which is eaten very little by the rest of the world. So when a restaurant makes a peanut sauce using peanut butter, it is really an American sauce and the furthest thing away from Thai or other Asian foods.

The peanut crop was actually not brought to Thailand until only a few hundred years ago. However, due to Thailand's warm, tropical climate, it ended up being a successful location for further peanut farming.