It seems like yesterday that Nongkran Daks beat celebrity chef-restaurateur Bobby Flay in a pad Thai throwdown held at Thai Basil, her restaurant in Chantilly. Today, candid photos of the 2009 event dot the walls at seated eye level. “When he pulled out the Kikkoman [soy sauce], I knew I had him,” she says. Daks’s pad Thai does not cut corners and remains the best rendition I’ve tasted.
The diminutive 70-year-old dynamo put this steamed dish on the menu when she opened Thai Basil 13 years ago, and she has been making it ever since. It is a favorite at her house “when we don’t know what to make,” she says.
It can be cooked in a ceramic (clay) pot or in a small, deep-sided saute pan with a lid. Korean and Vietnamese clay pots look slightly different but work the same way: Layers of flavor from bacon, cabbage and chicken broth enriched with Asian sauces come together in minutes. Daks prefers to use small metal pots she brought from her native Thailand, which are wider at the top to accommodate the noodle and shrimp layers of this dish. Regrettably, she hasn’t been able to find them in the States.
Ingredients can be found at larger grocery stores, but shopping at an Asian market might yield the special Thai seasoning sauce and optional cilantro roots that help make this dish taste like the one Daks makes.
The recipe doubles easily; build a separate pot and cook it alongside.
Ingredients
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