I've eaten Chicken Pad Khing (Ginger Chicken Stir Fry) many times in Thai restaurants. Really love the dish. I'm a very amateur cook and recently attempted this at home. It came out ok with the exception that every recipe out there doesn't include much sauce. In the restaurant, there's normally a good amount of sauce with the chicken and vegetables. In the recipes, it advises a couple of table spoons of fish sauce, couple of table spoons of oyster sauce and some sugar. This produces a very small amount of sauce that once cooked, doesn't leave any visible sauce left. I'm sure it's added to the flavour but the dish is still quite dry.
The obvious conclusion could be just to make more of the same sauce. My concern is that that before cooking, this sauce has an overwhelming fishy, and not very nice smell. When you get the sauce in the restaurant, there's certainly no fish taste to it. My feeling is that multiplying the ingredients by 4 or 5 would make a largely fish tasting sauce. I'm therefore wondering if anyone knows what normally goes in to the dark sauce that is served up in a Thai restaurant?
Best Answer
I just joined the other day after much lurking. Figured, I could help with this question. When I worked in a Thai restaurant, I had a couple of staple stir-fry sauces on hand. The basic one I had come up with had the folllowing:
The sauce will last forever, covered in the pantry or fridge. You'd just need to stir it up before using and, aside from being so versatile (with the exception of coconut soups, I may have put some of this in every Thai dish we served), the great thing is your dishes will be consistent. I'd just make it up in 5 gallon buckets and fill my little jug that I kept wok-side from the walk-in bucket. From this basic sauce, I would add sugar, vinegar, and hots to it to make a drunken noodle stir-fry sauce, or thickeners to it to make the sauces for other noodle dishes. My aunt likes to add Maggi to her stir fry base, but I don't like the way Maggi sauce smells. One of my employees would throw in a handful of fried garlic and vegetable oil to her sauce, and that was a great addition that saved a couple steps in the cooking process. You can totally make this sauce your own.
The basic stir fry sauce (a few tablespoons) is added to vegetable stock (a good bit, at least 1/2 cup) in stir fry recipes and if I wanted a dish to have more sauce, like I always do in Gai Pad Khing, I'd add more stock and more stir fry base, tasting as I go along and usually having to add a few more teaspoons of sugar for my tastes, letting it reduce a little bit in the pan, then finishing it off with a ton of white pepper, again, my tastes. And I'd usually not use a thickener in this dish, because my dad didn't use thickener when he made it for me growing up.
And, the fish sauce smell doesn't really go away when it's cooked. I'd avoid adding more than a single tablespoon to any one dish.
Hope that helps!
Source: I'm Thai, have been cooking Thai food for 20plus years.