How Padaek Celebrates Lao Cuisine in 8 Dishes

Khao Poon

Rice vermicelli soup

“Khao poon is one of the famous breakfasts in Laos. I remember as a child before I went to school, there was a lady walking around the neighborhood with her basket selling khao poon. So, yeah, it can be an all-day meal. It’s what I know from growing up and having it for breakfast.

Khao poon is one of the recipes that I learned from my aunt when I was in Laos in the 2000s. That was back, maybe 20 years ago, when I first went to Laos. I was still young at that time; I was in my 20’s, watching my aunt making it. With fresh herbs and cooked ones, you’re not just throwing everything in the pot. What she would make is a curry paste. It has core ingredients: Lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, garlic, shallots, red chili peppers and shrimp paste. We make ours in house.

We cook the curry in oil first instead of cooking it directly in coconut milk. A lot of people might see videos of people making curry paste, putting coconut milk and then putting curry paste and cooking it until the coconut milk breaks into oil.

But my process is this: I cook the curry paste in oil, until it gets nice aromas from the oil, and then I will add the coconut milk, and cook it for at least about another hour, just standing there. And I’ll stir it until the coconut milk reduces the oil, essentially breaking it down. The curry turns into some sort of lump, instead of a sauce. And then we’ll add more coconut milk, seasoning and a few lime leaves.

Kua mee

Laotian fried noodles

Kua mee is like the Lao version of pad thai. But kua mee is different from pad thai because it is only sweet and savory. There’s no tamarind or lime or vinegar and it’s actually eaten at room temperature. The herbs in kua mee — the cilantro, scallion, and bean sprouts — are supposed to be fresh. At the restaurant, we cook the noodles, and then we have to put them in a bowl and cool them down a little bit. Then we add the herbs.

I call it street noodles. The brown color comes from caramelization of the sugar. And, of course, I add a little bit of black soy sauce. It’s one of my favorite snacks when I was in Laos, when I was in school. All my restaurants need to have kua mee because it’s one of my favorite street snacks. I remember as a child this lady, she was selling it on the playground, and she would serve it on a newspaper or banana leaf.

The way I like to eat it these days is as a wrap. I love to serve it with lettuce and herbs. And people don’t get it. People just eat it like Pad Thai.

Naem Khao Thadaeu

Crispy rice salad

I had never made naem khao before I got married because it’s one of the most complicated dishes and a lot of people don’t really make it unless it’s for a special party, birthday or wedding. You don’t really make naem khao at home because it’s a process.

When I moved to Virginia, I asked my family friends, who knows how to make naem khao? This lady in Richmond, she knew how to make it. So, I learned from her. Basically, it’s coconut curry rice and you use the leftover rice. In Laos, we eat a lot of sticky rice, but we don’t eat a lot of jasmine rice. When we eat jasmine rice, we eat it with red curry. When you don’t eat a lot of jasmine rice, you have a lot of it left over. Somehow, somebody thought of this dish. It’s very unique. It only comes from one region of Laos, just one neighborhood. My mom used to take me as a little girl to eat in that particular neighborhood in Vientiane, the capital where I grew up.

It’s leftover rice made with coconut, a lot of galangal and [makrut] lime leaves. We mix that with grated coconut and form it into a ball and then deep fry it. Once it deep fries, we let it cool down, and then we’ll break it into small pieces, and we’ll add the ferment, the naem. Naem in Vietnamese means to cure, like a cured pork sausage that has a lot of pork skin. So we have to mix that with the cured sausages, then a squeeze of lime juice, fish sauce and herbs like scallion and onion. It’s eaten with lettuce and side herbs as a wrap.

It’s one of our popular dishes and I have been making it for my family ever since I moved here. I got married, I moved to Virginia, and I asked my family friend to teach me, and once she taught me, and I was the main cook for the family. So every time we have like five families getting together, they are like, I want naem khao, and I end up making naem khao for the whole family. When I opened the restaurant, that’s the thing I needed to put on the menu.

Laab

Ground meat salad

Each region in Laos has a different version of laab. Every family has their own taste preferences. My version of laab is from my grandmother. I started learning from between seven and nine-years-old – I was taught by my grandmother, but now I make it different from her. And my version of laab is different because of the herbs that I use. I’ll give you an example: Galangal. It’s a root from the ginger family, but galangal is quite strong.

You have to have three key ingredients — lemongrass, makrut lime leaves, and galangal. Those are the main ingredients besides the meat. The meat is mushroom, chicken, pork or whatever protein was available. My mom will cook those in the oil first. I like to use both fresh and cooked herbs, and I cook them in oil with ginger, a little bit of garlic and oil. I cook galangal and lemongrass, so it’s infused in the oil. That’s why it’s different from any other restaurant that you’ve probably eaten at. What I learned from my grandmother is cooking oil before we put it in laab. A lot of people chop [the fresh herbs] up and put it straight into the laab.

Laab is a traditional Lao dish. It is a main course you eat with rice. And sure, it’s a salad but it’s supposed to be eaten with rice. When people try laab from other Lao restaurants or other Thai restaurants, they come back to me and say, your laab is different. What is it that you do differently? I say, it’s the process.

Aom / Awk

Herbal stew

Sometimes you go to my restaurants and see aom or awk. The spelling depends on where you came from, what part of Laos. For customers who’ve never had it, I describe it as a curry without coconut milk. The process of making it is very similar to red curry but just without coconut milk. In Laos, we make the paste and throw it into the soup. The way I make it, I make the curry paste with the same red curry process. Then I cook it in oil again and then I will add the meat and the liquid. Then I will add the rice and the rice water from the sticky rice that has been soaked, and then we run it through either a mortar and pestle or a food processor and put that in to thicken the curry.

We call it herbal stew. The thickening comes from the rice. At Thip Khao we call it awk. Awk comes from the southern region. Instead of using rice flour, I use toasted rice powder. The sticky rice powder is toasted first and then processed like a powder; we add it for its smokey aromatics.

And there’s a lot of dill. A lot of people ask me, you guys use a lot of dill, why? In Laos, dill is one herb that is very popular. Instead of basil, like in any Thai curry, we top our dishes with dill. Besides mint, dill is one of our favorite herbs.

Tum Lao

Lao papaya salad

Tum Lao is a Lao papaya salad, and Tum Thai is Thai papaya salad. They’re very different. Tum Lao is a snack, and it can be like a hangover food. The way Lao people eat papaya is if we have friends coming to the house, we say, ‘Oh, you want to eat papaya salad,’ right? And then we’ll say baw phet baw sap, which means ‘not spicy, not good.’ So, the Lao kids will hear all the time from their parents. Now it has become a thing. And some people have made a T-shirt out of baw phet baw sap.

The heat comes from the fresh Thai chili. The funkiness, of course, is coming from a fermented fish paste. We call it padaek, which is the name of the restaurant. It’s an unfiltered fish sauce. The Lao version is more like an earthy color, kind of like a thick paste. You go to the supermarket, and you see all these fermented fish in the jar. That’s where the funkiness is coming from, the fish itself.

I was taught how to make the fish sauce from my grandmother. The typical fish sauce and the padaek sauce that Lao people use comes from the same jar. The top liquid in the jar is what we use for making the fish sauce. And the fish itself, we brew it into a padaek sauce, and that’s where the funkiness comes from, because it’s been fermenting for years. It’s one of the unique ingredients that is so hard to find also in the market. I have to order from a Thai food warehouse in LA and they will ship boxes of it. It is very popular in the northern region of Laos, which uses crab paste to make papaya salad. And if you ever travel to Northern Laos, like Luang Prabang, the papaya salad is not julienned. It’s more like pasta. It’s flat like a noodle.

I also use crab paste. A lot of people hear crab paste and think it sounds fancier. It sounds so good. But it’s not what you would expect. We have a few people return it because they couldn’t handle the funk. It’s actually an acquired taste. The fermented crab is made from rice paddy crabs, which are small, baby sized crabs that are fermented, smashed and strained to get the liquid to make it into a paste. That’s one thing that I put in ours. That’s what makes a difference — the crab paste, padaek, and shrimp paste as well. So that’s how Tum Lao is different from the Thai version.

And when I first moved to America, we couldn’t even find papaya to have papaya salad. And I ended up using carrots. Back then there was no padaek. And we just had to use fish sauce. Sometimes I would grab a jar of American anchovies to add a little bit of funkiness.

Khao Piak Sen

Rice noodle soup

This dish has become very popular in Laos. It is a breakfast noodle. Khao Piak Sen actually comes from Vietnamese influences. In Laos, there’s a lot of Vietnamese families who move to Laos to do some sort of business, just like any other country. Your neighbors move to do some sort of business, right? We also have Japanese immigrants, and they have sukiyaki which is like a claypot.

The Vietnamese brought in the khao piak sen. It has to be made fresh, because the noodles are very delicate. It doesn’t last too long. It is a rice noodle made with tapioca and rice flour. It’s not really hard to make, to be honest, but the shelf life is very short, and the noodles are similar to udon. But it’s made with rice flour, so it’s more tender and soft. Usually, it’s in a very simple broth like chicken stock, and it’s a comfort food, like a breakfast.

Crab Noodles

This dish is not Laotian but it’s something I came up with based on my travels. I use Chinese longevity noodles like other restaurants. I love longevity noodles and wishing people a long life. Actually, I love Chinese food, and I love to cook Chinese food.

I learned Chinese cooking in the 80s from ‘Yan Can Cook.’ Yan is my idol who cooks Chinese food. When we first came to America in 1983, my mom had to work two jobs, and my dad had to work two jobs. I was 14, and they assigned me to be a household cook. So I watched PBS, Julia Child, ‘Yan Can Cook,’ and that’s how I got into loving to cook Chinese food. I learned how to marinate the meat, how to do certain techniques.”

When I was traveling to the Bay Area where I was resettled with my family, we went to Vietnamese restaurants, and they had this garlic noodle. When I went to LA, I went to this restaurant in Beverly Hills, and my friend introduced me to garlic crab noodles again. I did my research, and I said, Oh, that is part of the Vietnamese immigration of coming to America and adding fish sauce, butter and garlic in noodles to become garlic noodles. In this version of mine, I do the same method with butter and fish sauce and lots of garlic, which is then wok tossed with Chinese shiitake mushroom and Chinese celery. A lot of people love it and it’s our best seller. It’s not Lao, it’s not Thai, it’s just something that I love.