The Beginning
I like the Thai Pavilion brand “Authentic Pad Thai” kits from Hannaford.
I haven’t added anything to it in the past, so it’s just rice noodles, sauce, and chopped peanuts. Today, I conducted my first experiment in altering the composition of the meal.
Calamari is the added ingredient today, because I love seafood but have never tried cooking with it. It was a bag of frozen rings from the seafood section of the store.
I knew that calamari didn’t have a particularly strong taste, but it seemed like a pretty fool-proof addition. To try infusing as much “sea” flavor as I could, I used the same water I boiled the calamari in to also cook the rice noodles. I chopped the calamari into halves and added it to the pad thai sauce cooking in the pan, moving it around a bit to coat each piece. I added the noodles, stirring it all for a while until I was satisfied.
Result:
Pad Thai with chewy bits.
My conclusion is that calamari doesn’t have a strong enough flavor on its own to really come through in this recipe. The sauce does have a pretty significant flavor already, so the calamari is pretty much completely overtaken.
I think that it may be a better addition, for the protein at least, if the calamari is more finely cut into very small bits, perhaps even put in a food processor and coarsely chopped.
I’ll be trying smoked oysters and bean sprouts next time.
