The Secret Is In The Sauce To Make Classic Pad See Ew

When you sit down at your favorite Thai restaurant — or order delivery — which favorite dishes do you scan the menu for? Perhaps a curried chicken noodle soup featuring rice noodles, a fresh green curry, or maybe a robust beef and vegetable stir fry? Maybe you go straight to the menu's noodle section, where perennially popular pad thai and pad see ew can be found.

If you've ever had a Classic Pad See Ew, then you know that this dish of stir-fried wide rice noodles coated in a sweet, sticky sauce is a real crowd-pleaser. Typically served with broccoli, chicken breast, and scrambled eggs, pad see ew's flavors lean Chinese — and that's no coincidence. According to Foodicles, the dish actually originated in China's Guangdong province, then became popular in Thailand — initially in Bangkok — when the area's Teochew people emigrated to that city and recreated the dish using Thai ingredients. Now popular across many a Thai menu (via Nation's Restaurant News), the dish is dead simple to make at home using recipe developer Ting Dalton's version featuring a deeply flavorful sauce.

If you've ever enjoyed a great version of Classic Pad See Ew — either in a restaurant or in your own kitchen — then you know that the dish's appeal lies in its sweet-salty sauce. Typically composed of a mix of soy sauce, oyster sauce, rice wine vinegar, and fish sauce, the secret to the sauce stirred up by recipe developer Ting Dalton is a double dose of soy sauces, in the form of both light and dark soy sauces.

According to Serious Eats, dark soy sauce — even if it isn't labeled as such — is the type of soy sauce most commonly sold. So what's light soy sauce? The outlet explains that this type of soy is lighter and thinner, but has a stronger, saltier flavor than dark soy, which can be the natural result of the brewing process, or due to additives such as rice wine, and corn syrup, or vinegar.

As Dalton tells us, the two types of soy sauce combined bring a depth of flavor to her classic pad see ew that truly makes the dish shine. "Pad see ew takes its main flavor from soy — so it is pretty important to have the two," she said. Referring to light soy sauce, she noted, "it's easily found in most grocery stores or Asian supermarkets."