Low FODMAP Pad See Ew

The rough translation of “pad see ew” is “fried with soy sauce” and indeed they are! It is a popular street food in Thailand which combines rice noodles with some wort of protein – beef, pork or chicken and you can even use tofu for a plant-based protein. The sauce always contains soy sauce. Some cooks use oyster sauce in addition, as we do here. It adds depth, complexity and umami. Recipes usually also include vinegar and sugar. Chinese broccoli, gai lan, is the highlighted vegetable and an egg is scrambled in there, too. It is prepared with a stir-fry technique.

Gai lan is Chinese broccoli and it has a generous low FODMAP serving size of 75 g, which is about 1 cup chopped. It is very leafy, with prominent stems and very little flower, which makes it very different from regular broccoli. It also has a different taste – it is more bitter – which is partly what makes pad see ew what it is. There really is no substitute.

We do not recommend it. Not only will you miss out on the leafy aspects of gai lan, but the flavor is also not the same at all. See Q&A above.

This recipe was developed with oyster sauce as a key ingredient, so for this low FODMAP Pad See Ew the answer is yes. We use Panda Green Label Oyster Sauce, which is gluten-free and low FODMAP.

Many traditional recipes for Pad See Ew call for both light and dark soy sauce, which not everyone has easy access to. I use one kind of soy sauce and please note that I suggest low-sodium and naturally brewed. This dish is salty as it is, and in my opinion needs the low sodium to work – and it must be a naturally brewed soy sauce as well. There are lesser soy sauces that are very harsh and chemically produced. The latter are the type often found in US supermarkets and we do not recommend them for any dish, but especially this one, which counts on a well-flavored, savory high quality soy sauce. Try San-J brand.

This is a great question! If you have access to fresh noodles, such as sen yai, then you could tweak the recipe and use them. If you do buy them, keep them at room temperature and use ASAP. They become hard and unmanageable if refrigerated. Because most folks will not have access to sen yai, I chose to use easier-to-find and/or mail-order dried rice noodles. Get the ones labeled XL as seen below. They still will not be as wide as fresh, but they are a great substitute.

You will be cooking your rice noodles in water first. Cook them until they are still al dente and a bit firm. They cook again in the sauce in your wok, so if they are cooked through initially, they will overcook and fall apart once they get to the wok. Undercook a bit initially!

Pad See Ew usually contains a fair amount of fresh garlic, which of course is high FODMAP. We get garlic flavor into the recipe in two ways: 1) With FreeFod Garlic Replacer -and there is no replacement for this dish, and 2) with Low FODMAP Garlic-Infused Oil, made with vegetable oil. Please do not the kind in olive oil. We make our own but if you want to purchase, we like Tourangelle.

We like the moist texture and meaty flavor of chicken thighs. If you would like to use skinless, boneless chicken breast, you can. Take care not to overcook.

Pad See Ew is a classic stir-fried dish, and a wok, with its classic bowl-like shape, provides the kind of heat and contact between food and pan that provides best results. We like carbon steel woks but recently we have been using a cast-iron wok. It holds heat exceptionally well and cleans easily.
 
If you do not have a wok, just make sure you use a very heavy pan, with great heat conductivity, and make sure it is large enough and with high enough sides to hold all of the ingredients and toss everything around.