Pad Thai (Take 2)

When we were browsing through the Asian Supermarket the other day I decided it was time to pick up the supplies for another round of Pad Thai.  Side note about the Asian Supermarket, the fresh sections (fish and produce) are amazing and cheap but I'm sad it's put the other Asian markets on Central Avenue out of business.  The Supermarket covers so many different countries, including India, it's lost a lot of the specialization that Kim's and Lee's had.  They don't have Okonomiyaki mix for example.  Change is sad in this instance :(. 

Moving on to dinner though, I thought sufficient enough time had passed (over a year) from my last attempt that it was time to try again.  You see, the last time I tried to make this dish I didn't really do any research into what the ingredients I wanted really were.  I thought fish sauce, tamarind and palm sugar would be easy enough.  Not so much though,  I ended up with the right tamarind but the fish sauce I got was a gray, gelatinous substance.  I'm still not really sure what type it was.  And it was so strong that by the time dinner was ready I was so nauseous from the aroma, having never cooked with any fish sauce before, that I couldn't eat any of it.  That and the noodles didn't really get cooked enough in my portion and they were overcooked in Joel's.

So, onto tonight.  I armed myself with the instructions from Chez Pim again, which I found by Googling pad thai instructions (not recipe).  I used her guide the first time as well and it's long but worth reading and I trust the commenters, I was just a dope.  The Golden Boy fish sauce that I purchased for this go around was indeed much less pungent, at least it was after I finally opened it after Googling the instructions on how to get into the darn thing.  Once you get the plastic overwrap off and flip open the yellow top you are confronted by a seemingly impenetrable white plastic nipple.  Really there's no other way to describe it.  And I wasn't the only one who had this problem because there are at least 4 threads about it on Chowhound alone.  Once of the posters named it Superwoman's Nipple and we had to agree.  So I attacked the nipple with my trusty kitchen shears (and man, you couldn't just cut that thing off, I had to jab the scissors in and dig it out) while Joel patiently scraped the palm sugar out of the container.  I had thought that getting the jar of palm sugar would be easier to deal with than the hard pats you can get in a bag.  I was incorrect, but at least I had reinforcements. 

Chez Pim calls for starting the sauce with 1/2 each of fish sauce, tamarind and palm sugar and then tasting and adding to get your desired result.  I cut the amount in half for just the two of us, unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with how the sauce should taste before it gets added to all of the ingredients.  The final result was a bit too heavy on the tamarind, the milder fish sauce was really a lot milder.  Also, I was using my new wok which I apparently didn't season well enough because the sauce burned onto the middle making cooking the second batch a little difficult.  The shrimp were super tasty and I added tofu which even Joel agreed actually tasted good.  The noodles though, those darn noodles, they stuck together.  Maybe the third time will be the charm?  I was able to eat it this time so things are definitely looking up.