Pad Kra Pao (Thai Basil Pork with Rice) Recipe

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A few years ago, we travelled to South East Asia and took a cooking class in Chiang Mai (Thailand) where we learned to make curry, tom yum soup, and mango sticky rice. As a parting gift, the cooking school gave us a copy of all their Thai recipes including this Pad Kra Pao recipe. This recipe can be made with any protein as the base – we believe Chicken is the most common protein but any ground meat will do. For us, we used ground pork as that was what we had available to us.

Pad Kra Pao

One of the key ingredients to this Pad Kra Pao recipe is Thai Basil.

We would not recommend replacing this with regular Basil (i.e. Genovese Basil) as the overall dish would not taste the same. You can easily find Thai Basil at your local Asian grocery store. They typically have more defined veins/ridges on their leaves and often have thick purply stems (see photo below).

Image result for thai basil

How to make Pad Kra Pao:

To make this dish, you’ll need to finely chop up some garlic, shallots, and bird’s eye chili. You can adjust the amount of chili peppers based on how spicy you want it to be. We used about 2 chilis (because we have a low spice tolerance) but kept the seeds to give it a bit more of a kick as most of the spiciness comes from chili seeds. We also added in some chopped green beans but this is totally optional đŸ™‚

mise en place

In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, cook the shallots and garlic in some vegetable oil until they’re fragrant and aromatic. Then, add in your chili peppers and green beans.

Once those items are cooked, add in your ground pork and fry until the pork is thoroughly cooked and you don’t see anymore pink in the meat.

add pork

Finally, add in your mixture of brown sugar, fish sauce, soy sauce (light and dark), oyster sauce, and chicken broth (or water). Continue to cook until all the liquid reduces and starts to caramelize and the pork turns slightly crispy. Once you’ve reached this stage, you’re almost done! Just add in a handful of Thai Basil and cook until it’s wilted (less than a minute) and serve with rice.

add basil

You can add an optional fried egg as well to finish the dish. That’s it! How did yours turn out?

pad kra pao

Did you enjoy this recipe?

If you tried this recipe and enjoyed it, be sure to comment below and tag us on Instagram @cookingwithteamj. You may also enjoy our Shrimp Pad Thai recipe.



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