Thai Basil Chicken (Pad Ka-Prao)
Thai Basil Chicken (Pad Ka-Prao)
Ingredients
- 1 pound of ground pork or chicken
- 7 large cloves of garlic peeled
- 7 bird’s eye chilis or however many you can tolerate
- 1 large shallot peeled and roughly chopped
- 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1 tablespoon fish sauce
- 1 tablespoons thin/light soy sauce or seasoning sauce such as Golden Mountain aka “the Green Cap” sauce”
- 1 tablespoon dark sweet soy sauce kecap manis
- ½ tablespoon oyster sauce
- 1 teaspoon brown sugar
- ¼ cup chicken stock
- 1 cup holy basil leaves packed
Instructions
- If you have a mortar, pound together the garlic, chilies, and shallot until you get a coarse paste. If no mortar, either chop them all up with a cleaver on a chopping block or pulse them into a coarse paste in a mini-chopper.
- In a small bowl, combine fish sauce, light and dark soy sauce, oyster sauce and chicken stock. Set aside.
- In a skillet, heat up the vegetable oil over medium-high heat. Add the paste to it and fry until fragrant.
- Add the meat to the skillet, break it up with the spatula into small pieces and cook until browned.
- Add the bowl of liquids and cook for 5 minutes until golden brown.
- Before taking the skillet off the heat, add the basil leaves to the mixture and give it a couple of stirs. We only want to wilt the basil with the residual heat that is still in the pan so as not to mute the fragrance of the fresh holy basil leaves.
- Serve over rice.
Notes
Option -> Use ½ pound ground pork and ½ pound ground chicken.