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Welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen. If you've ever been to Thailand, you know that noodle soups are a huge part of our diet. It is everywhere. But did you know that at almost every noodle soup shop, you can order a dry version? Yes. So, noodle soup without soup. Now, dry noodles may not sound particularly good to you, but let me show you. This is a dry noodles that we're going to make today. A little squeeze of lime. And just let me show you. Just because it's a it's dry does not mean it doesn't have a lot of flavor. Instead of soup, the noodles are tossed in this beautiful seasoning. And it is so flavorful. You will not believe it.
Look at this. Oh my god. Unbelievable. It is so satisfying. And I promise you will not miss the soup because there are just so much flavor and texture coming out of here. Now, there are many different types of dry noodles that you can get in Thailand. But today, I want to show you my favorite type, this one, which is what we call guio hang to yam or toyam dry noodles. And if you know anything about Thai food, when you hear the word tom, you know that it's going to be sour. It's going to be spicy and it's going to be loaded with flavor. This is truly a hidden gem of Thai street food. And with this recipe, it'll be just like you are in Thailand. And as a bonus, this is a really good dish to
make a street food party because, as you'll see, you get to pretend to be a bit like a street food vendor. You've got all the toppings in front of you and your friends can, you know, take the bowl and top their own bowl like a noodle bar. It is just so much fun. So, there are four major components we have to prep. The noodles, the protein, the seasoning, and the toppings. Sounds like a lot, but trust me, everything is extremely simple, and they can all be made ahead of time. Let's get started with the noodles. For this recipe, you can use a few different types of noodles, but I highly recommend my favorite type, which is the small size rice noodles. These I feel like has the
best texture and size for this recipe and it's widely available anywhere. And all you have to do is soak them in room temperature water until they're fully pliable. 25 to 30 minutes usually does it for this size. However, if you live in a cold climate like I do, don't use cold water straight out of the tap in the winter time because if it's actually cold water, your noodles will take longer to soak. So, it should feel neither warm nor cold on your hands. And once they're soaked, and don't over soak it because you will then overcook them very easily. Um, you can drain them and actually keep them in the fridge for up to a week. So, it's a good thing to get done ahead of time to make dinner even
faster. For the protein, most street vendors will give you three different types of protein at least. But at home, you don't have to, but if you do, here is what they would be. Sliced pork, ground pork, and Asian style meatballs. These are pork meatballs to stick to the pork theme, but you can use chicken, fish balls, beef balls. Um, if you don't eat pork, this can be ground chicken and sliced chicken. And if you're going to omit one or two, you can, but I recommend not omitting the ground pork or ground chicken because this is kind of the identity of guam. All right, let's prep these. For the ground pork, I've got some water here in a pot that I'm going to simply bring to a boil. Then add the ground pork and a
little bit of fish sauce to season. And then just keep stirring and stirring until the pork is fully cooked and broken up. And that's all there is to it. I told you it was simple. I'm going to take out the pork and leaving all of the cooking water behind. We're going to need that for our seasoning. If you've got a slushed spoon, this will be easier. Now for the sliced pork, you can use any lean cuts here. I'm using pork like meat, but tenderloin or loin will be fine. And thinly slice them. And then simply marinate with soy sauce and a little bit of sugar. Give that a good mix just until you no longer see any pooling soy sauce at the bottom. And then it's done. We will cook that off
later. For the meatballs, there's nothing you need to do other than cut them into bite-sized pieces. They are fully cooked. So, we're just going to heat them up close to serving time. Next thing we're going to make is one thing that is common to all Thai noodle soups and dry noodles, and that is fried garlic. Now, I know that you can conveniently buy fried garlic in a tub at many Asian grocery stores, but for this, I want you to make it yourself because you will need the garlic oil as part of the noodle seasoning. And in dry noodles without the broth, the seasoning is super important. And the garlic oil is not only going to keep your noodles from clumping together, it'll add so
much flavor. And it is super, super easy. All you have to do is add some neutral oil to a small pot and heat it over mediumigh heat. Add one piece of chopped garlic as our temperature tester. Once our test garlic is bubbling, turn the heat down to low and then add the rest of the garlic. And try your best to chop the garlic as evenly as you can so that they fry at the same rate. Now, once they're in there, stir them frequently to avoid any hot spots and remove them from the heat once they are golden, not brown. and they'll continue to darken slightly even after you've taken them off the heat. Drain them through a metal sie and that's it.
You can keep both the garlic and the garlic oil in the fridge for a few months and use it on anything you want. Now that we have the fried garlic, we are ready to mix up our noodle seasoning. Now, for this, I think it's best to do it like a street food vendor, which means we're going to mix the seasoning in the serving bowl one bowl at a time. seems inefficient, but trust me, it's not. And I'll explain why in a little bit. Okay, so in here, we're going to mix our lime juice. That's the sour. Our fish sauce for salty. This is to yum. We need sweet, salty, sour. So, the sweet's just going to be sugar. White sugar is fine. And spicy. I've got some roasted chili flakes here. It's to taste. Um, but this is typically quite
spicy. So, at you there, it should be a bit of a kick. Okay, now I'm going to add some chicken buong powder um for that familiar umami from your Asian auntie's kitchen. You don't have to add it if you don't want to. Um and then that fried garlic oil. And remember that ground pork cooking liquid that we had that we saved from earlier. I'm going to add a just a tablespoon of that. If for some reason you don't have this, you threw it away by accident or whatever, you can just use water or if you've got some stock uh in the fridge already open, you can use that as well. And that is it. You don't even have to stir it because once we add the noodles and mix it all together, it'll stir itself. Now, why did I not
just mix all the seasonings together and then dole it out into each bowl? And there's a reason why street vendors also don't do that. And it's because if you keep all the ingredients separate, you can make adjustments per bowl easily as needed. For example, if somebody doesn't eat spicy and they want less chilies, you can do that. If somebody is gluten-free or is morally opposed to chicken buong powder, you can leave that out. Somebody wants less sugar, so on and so forth. So, by not combining everything, you have the flexibility to make those adjustments. And even if that was not a concern for you, um it's not as easy as you think it's going to be because the ingredients
don't mix well. The garlic oil will separate and sit at the top. The chilies will tend to like float or sink. So, you'll have a hard time trying to divide the sauce up evenly even if you mix everything together. So, you know, it's just and it's not as much work as you think to just dole out the ingredients into the serving bowls. It's very fast once you got everything out. And there's a reason why street vendors do it this way. Now, for those of you who are astute Thai food afficionados, you might be thinking, "Wait a minute, didn't you say this is a toyam noodles?" But I don't see no lemongrass, no galanga, no lime leaf anywhere. What is happening?
Well, there are actually two uses of the word tom. Most people in the western world know tomium as the soup with shrimp and lemongrass and a lot of herbs and all of that. But in the context of noodle soup and dry noodles by extension, the term tom is actually a style of seasoning that is sour and spicy. Okay? So, when you're at a noodle stall in Thailand, you can order your noodles regular or you can order your noodles to style. If you order it toam style, they're going to add lime juice. They're going to add ground chilies to make it spicy. They're also going to add uh ground peanuts because the peanuts help balance the acidity of the lime juice that was just added. And they'll
also likely add some ground pork. So, it's just two different ways the same word is used. One is a dish, a soup, and the other one is a noodle seasoning variation, but both are spicy, both are sour, and both are delicious. One last thing before we cook, we got to prep our toppings. If you ever look at a noodle vendor on the street in Thailand, you will see a ton of little toppings bowl. This is the fun part, and it's not as much work as you think. Everything is very simple. So, we have some ground peanuts, coarsely ground. So, you want to start with unsalted peanuts. And I pound them in my mortar and pestle, but
you can also use a knife to chop them or a quick blitz in a food processor also works. This is dried shrimp fluff, which is optional, but it does add a nice umami and that kind of seafood flavor. And what I did is I first roughly chopped my dried shrimp because they're large. And then I ground them up in a coffee grinder until fine and fluffy. If your dried shrimp are not super big, you don't have to chop them first. You can grind them directly in the grinder. Then we also have some chopped green onions, some chopped cilantro, which you can skip if you don't like the fried garlic that we made earlier, some bean sprouts, and a wedge of lime just as an option on the side for those who feel like they
want it a little bit more sour. And that is it. Now we are ready to cook. So I've got a large pot of water here that I'm bringing to a boil. And you do want a large pot for this so that the temperature doesn't drop too much in between batches. And while the water is coming to a boil, you want to separate the noodles into portions. And I just, you know, put paper towel in between to keep them separate. And you want to do this because we're going to cook them one portion at a time. Why? Why not just dump them all in and separate them into portions after they're cooked? Well, if you've ever tried to separate a pile of hot steaming cooked rice noodles, you know it is a nightmare, okay? You're
burning yourself. The noodles seem like they go on forever. It is impossible. Much easier to separate them while they are still cold. And they only take 10 seconds to cook each. So even if you've got 10 of them to do, it will not take that long to cook them. Um, also, but doing it this way, you can get the portions exactly the same. So I actually use a scale to measure out all of my noodles to make sure all the portions are the same. Because if you've got one big, one small, then now your seasoning is going to be off, right? Because you've got your seasonings all measured out. So, there's just like so many benefits to doing this and no benefits in doing it the other way. And street
vendors, even if they've got 10 orders of the same thing coming, they will only cook one portion of noodle at a time because of that. All right. So, my water is boiling now. First thing we're going to do is cook the meatballs. Well, not cook, but heat them up because they're already cooked. And so, they should only take about a minute for this part. And one sign that they are heated through is they are bigger. Like they'll look like they've expanded a little bit. Okay, that's it. They are done. And look, I got them all in one scoop. Mhm. Okay. And then next, we're going to cook the sliced pork, which I'm going to cook in my noodle strainer, but you can use a sie or you can use a wire skimmer like I
just did. But I think if you have one of these, it's just easier because they're smaller pieces and they won't it's harder to fish them out in one scoop. So once the pork goes in, you shake them about. And for this size of pork, they literally take like 20 seconds. Um, so as soon as the outside looks done, if you're sliced thinly, okay, not like big honken pieces, as soon as the outside looks done, you're done. Take them out. Shake it off. And that's it. Hooray. Okay. Everything that I've done up until this point, you can do in advance. But I do not want you to proceed. Do not cook the noodles until everybody who is going to eat is physically in your field of vision.
Because this is a dish that once the noodles are mixed with the seasoning, you want to eat right away. Otherwise, the noodles will absorb the noodles and they swell and they cool down. It's just not nearly as good. So, all of this you can just do, relax. When you're ready to eat, call everybody and then and only then start cooking the noodles. All right, you are now a street vendor. Your noodles are ready to go in your noodle strainer. Um, you can also use a metal sie as long as it will submerge into here or dump them in and use a big spider wire skimmer to fish it out. But if you have this, just so handy.
Seasonings should be all in their individual bowls. Toppings are ready to go. Humans ready to eat. Okay, this is where we're at right now. Water full boil. Not like this. Not steaming, not simmering. Full boil. Come on. Humans are waiting. Let's go. Okay. 10 sec. Count to 10. Okay. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 and then out. Shake off all the liquid. You don't want any of that extra. I'm going to turn this off for now. And immediately into your seasoning bowl. Now you're going to mix everything. Oh, that looks so good already. And then I'll show you how to top everything. But let me just rearrange real quick.
Get rid of this pot. Okay. So, at this point, what I actually would recommend you do is once you've mixed the noodles, hand it off to your diners and they can start putting stuff in themselves with some guidance, right? Like you want to give them the right size spoon for the right amount of topping. Um, but it can be a lot of fun for people to do this part themselves. And then you can just continue with the noodle cooking. So once the noodles are mixed, I'm going to add some bean sprouts, which I like to mix into the noodles. So you can do this part for your people, too, I guess. And then you just mix. You can just put some meat on meatballs.
Uh ground pork. Don't be stingy because I think it's really like once it mixes in with the noodles, it gives a lovely texture. Lots of ground peanuts. I'm telling you, this makes a big difference. Some ground dried shrimp, cilantro, green onion, and garlic. And then if you want, there's a little lime, but I'm not going to need it right now. And that is it. And because I said you need to eat this right now, I'm going to eat this right now to show you. Um, so here, let me clear this so you can see this bowl in all of its glory. So, you're going to I know this looks really pretty, but you're going to
mix everything. Ah, look at this. The noodles just look so flavorful and delicious. So, get everything mixed up. And it's important to do this immediately because once the noodles cool, it gets harder and harder to mix everything up, right? Cuz the oil starts to thicken a little bit. Oh my god, I'm like salivating. I can't handle it. I'm salivating. [snorts] Okay, here we go. Oh my god. It's so perfect. I can't even tell you. I mean, look at this. Look how good that looks. The noodle texture is perfect. It's fully cooked, but it is chewy. If it is your first time, I recommend tasting the noodles when it comes out. And if it's under, put it back
in for a sec, a second or two only. But if it is over, nothing you can do for that one. But you want to reduce the time for your next batch. The perfect texture should be slightly al dente, like a little chew. And the perfect balance of sweet, sour, spicy, salty. Nothing should like jump out. It should be in per perfect harmony. I am telling you, it is so good and so much fun to make. You just spend a little time getting all the little things prepped and then the people just have fun putting it all together and it's like you're pretending to be in Thailand. So, the recipe as always will be on hot thaiikitchen.com. A special thanks to all of our Patreon members who help support the show. If you want to
know what that's all about, I put the link in the description below. Thank you as always for watching and I will see you next time.
