Authentic Chicken Pad Thai at Home

We partnered with purveyors of World Cuisine, Saffron Road, to create an authentic and delicious family-sized Chicken Pad Thai dish with our gluten-free Pad Thai Rice Noodles. The dish is available exclusively at Costco locations in Texas, so if that’s your state, you’re in luck!

While the popular dish is synonymous with Thai cuisine (few Thai takeout orders are placed without it!), we decided to take a closer look at the glory that is pad Thai noodles, or more accurately, kway teow pad Thai (stir-fried rice noodles Thai-style), and learn more about where it came from.

It may surprise you to learn that the dish is not actually very Thai at all! As it turns out, pad Thai was inspired by dishes and ingredients from around Asia. For example, the noodle stir-fry was born in and already extremely popular in China. In addition, only a few of the ingredients in the traditional preparation of the pad Thai are native to Thailand, including the red chili peppers. Most of the other ingredients can be readily found all over the continent.

We learned that the dish rose to popularity in the late 1930s in part as an effort to improve national nutritional deficits that had set in with a troubled economy at the time. The inexpensive ingredients were in abundance and would cover a lot of nutritional bases: rice noodles, veggies, bean sprouts, and cheap protein offered complete nutrition in a single dish.

Now the dish is served at virtually every Thai restaurant around the world and is often the deciding factor of whether the restaurant passes the taste test. Saffron Road has perfected the recipe using our authentic noodles, so now you can stock the dish in your freezer to have at the ready.

Check us out at: NonaLim.com

REFERENCES: TheAtlantic.com: The Non-Thai Origins of Pad Thai & Gastronomica.org: Finding Pad Thai