20-Minute Thai Basil Stir Fry - Ground Pork Pad Kra Pow | The Woks of Life

Hi everyone, I'm Sarah from The Walks of Life, and today we are going to make one of our most popular recipes, pad kra pao. It's a Thai recipe, and it is so easy, so delicious. It takes no time, very few ingredients, very little prep. What's great about this recipe is that the basil is like really forward. It's almost like a vegetable. You add it in a pretty significant quantity. I'm gonna use about a cup and a half packed. If you wanted to, you could use two cups, you could put more. I'm using ground pork today, but you could also use ground chicken, you could use ground beef, you could even use seafood, but today we're using ground pork. I think it's probably my favorite option just because it's so easy to find, the pork is really juicy. So I have oil, this is avocado oil. We like it for its high smoke point, but you could use any neutral oil you have. You could use vegetable canola, et cetera. We have oyster sauce, fish sauce, Thai thin soy sauce. You could also use any Chinese light soy sauce or whatever regular soy sauce you have on hand. And we have dark soy sauce, which is mostly for color. If you have it, you could use Thai black soy sauce in place of the Chinese dark soy sauce. We also have sugar here. If you have palm sugar on hand, that would be great to use. The ground pork, garlic, Thai bird chilies, and shallots. I have eggs, which I'm gonna fry up and put on top. And I have a little bit of chicken stock here. Finally, I have the basil. This recipe on our website garnered quite a bit of controversy in the comments when we first posted it. Pad Kra Pao technically is made with holy basil. It actually means stir fried with holy basil. Holy basil is a variety that is really tough to find here in the US. I've actually never seen it in a market. However, I will say Thai basil works really great in this recipe. Regular sweet Italian basil also works great. I know that people will come after me for that, but to be honest, if the difference is making the dish with sweet Italian basil or not having the dish at all, I say make it with Italian basil. And if you wanna try it with holy basil, then get yourself a plane ticket to Thailand or get yourself a pack of seeds and grow it in the garden. Whenever I eat this, I'm always digging for the basil because that little like pop of freshness and flavor with the savory pork and the runny egg and the rice, it's just, it's so good. So let's start chopping our aromatics. I'm gonna start with the chilies. I have three here and these are actually defrosted. So if you don't have fresh chilies, feel free to use frozen. They usually come in a really big package from the Chinese market and you're like, how am I ever gonna use those before they all go bad? You're definitely not meant to use the entire package. Put them directly into a Ziploc bag like this, throw it in the freezer. When you take it out, they'll be a little bit frosty and just rinse it and wash it at that point. You don't wanna wash and then freeze because then I think that's what happened to this bag. You get a lot of this ice in the bottom. I'm just going to take the ends off the chilies. If you are spice averse, you can just completely omit these to be honest. You could reduce the number or you could de-seed them. I tend to just leave them whole with the seeds. This is our garden garlic that we grew. So the cloves are pretty tiny. We need seven cloves. I'm just gonna smash them and peel them and then I'm going to slice them. I'm always happy when I look at my own recipes and it says sliced garlic. Slicing garlic is so much easier than mincing it. Now the shallots, same kind of deal. We have these homegrown shallots and they are tiny. They're about the size of a small chestnut. So while we call for two, I'm gonna use four. If you can't find shallots or you don't happen to have them on hand, small red onion will work in a pinch. Now we just have to pull the leaves off the Thai basil. The reason I have two types of Thai basil here is some of it was grown in my parents' garden and some of it was grown on my back deck. And as you can see, mine is a little bit more anemic. The leaves are a little smaller. My parents' on the other hand is vibrant and very large. But I'm just gonna use both. So you just pick off the leaves. We call for one and a half cups packed. I don't bother pulling out a measuring cup when I make this. A half cup is enough to fit in like a tight fist. So you want re-tight fists worth of Thai basil. It tends to brown extremely quickly if stored improperly. So the way to store it if you've picked some is to wrap it in plastic and don't get it wet until you're ready to use it. So this is a half cup. I just need two more of those. Her mom was very happy to hear that we were making this recipe for this video because she has four Thai basil plants up in the garden that are just going gangbusters. But as you can see, a dish like this will use up quite a bit of it. Now I'm at the wok. I have my wok spatula and I'm ready to cook. If you don't have a wok, that's okay. You can cook this in a regular pan. You just wanna make sure that you're cooking over a pretty high heat. If you are using a carbon steel or cast iron pan, just make sure that you heat it before adding oil. That will make the pan nonstick. I'm actually going to start by frying the eggs. I'm not really worried about the eggs getting cold. And actually this way, I don't have to wash the wok and then fry the eggs or fry it in a separate pan. I can just do it all in one. It's less washing, it's a little bit more efficient. The wok is slightly smoking and now I'm gonna add the oil. Add quite a bit of oil. Whatever is in there residually is going to be used in the pad kra pao and this is also just going to give the eggs a really crispy, bubbly edge, which is what we want. You can turn down the heat a bit because the egg is already bubbly around the edges. I'm just gonna cover it really briefly to cook the white that's surrounding the yolk, but not so long that you cook the yolk. It's gonna vary based on your heat level, so you kind of just have to check on it. Okay, nice, bubbly fried egg. Draining some of the oil and we can remove that to a plate. At this point, you wanna have about three tablespoons of oil in the wok, so I'm just gonna add a little bit more and I'm going to add the shallots and the garlic. Fry this for a couple minutes over a medium to a medium-high heat, but you see how if you fry the egg first, you just didn't even have to wash the wok. You didn't have to get out another pan, you didn't have to wash the wok. The egg is still gonna be really, really delicious. I just think it's the better order. Okay, let's add the chilies. We'll fry it for another minute or so. I'm going to add the ground pork. Crank up the heat to high. Break it up and you want the meat to get kind of nice and crispy. I'm just gonna mix it a bit. This gets the garlic off the bottom of the wok, spread the meat around. This lets it sear in a single layer so it can get nice and crispy. It's releasing some liquid, some fat and water. While it is doing that, we can add the seasonings. One teaspoon sugar, one tablespoon of fish sauce. And I'm actually gonna stir it now because I can kind of hear it sizzling. You wanna balance between crisping the pork but not burning the aromatics. Thai thin soy sauce, tablespoon. Give it another stir. And if you need to at this point, the pork is really nicely crisp. You can turn down the heat a little bit to give you more time for your measuring and adding. So just a quick sidebar on dark soy sauce versus Thai black soy sauce. You could use either of these. Our recipe calls for Chinese dark soy sauce simply because a lot of our readers already have it in their pantry. But if you can find this black soy sauce, it plays a very similar role as Chinese dark soy sauce. I'm probably just gonna use this because we're running kind of low on it. You could also pre-mix the sauce ingredients. Oyster sauce goes in. Stir this up. And now we can deglaze the pan with this chicken stock that we had. We call for low sodium. All the other ingredients in here are quite salty. If you don't have stock on hand, just use water. So we do want most of this liquid to cook off, but once we add the Thai basil, the sauce is gonna kind of coat that as well. So I'm gonna add that. There may be some people out there who would say that this is too much Thai basil, but for me personally, it's not. All right, we need rice. This would also really go great with our coconut rice. We will link in the description box below. Really easy, really, really delicious with this. Generous with the rice. So pretty, so yummy. And the finishing touch is our fried egg. No small bites here. No, we are not dainty biters. That is so, so good. Thai basil, holy basil, Italian basil. The basil is key here, and the pork is nice and crispy. It's really savory. It's a little tiny bit sweet. Emblematic of Thai cuisine, that really great balance. The crispy fried egg with that really rich yolk brings it all together. It kind of like tones down the saltiness of the pork itself, and it's just perfection. And that is pad kra pao, a delicious Thai basil stir fry. Holy basil or no holy basil, you can make this dish and enjoy it. I love it, and I love making it, and I hope you do too. So if you like this video, like it and subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out more recipes on thewalksoflife.com. Give me like a, I'm starving, let's go taste it. I'm starving, let's go taste it. You didn't put pepper? Okay, Ma, we're still filming. Feel free to use frozen. I should just throw it at you now.