Celebrating Pad Thai: 5 surprising facts about the go-to dish

The Google Doodle hails the simple Thai street food dish

(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Pad Thai one of the most simple and delicious street food dishes around.

Rice noodles stir-fried with eggs and some tofu, shrimp or meat is the basis for the dish. It's typically flavoured with some tamarind pulp, fish sauce, garlic, chilli and sugar. Garnishes may include a simple lime wedge or some chopped, toasted peanuts.

These straightforward ingredients are brought together in an explosion of flavour, in a dish which costs the equivalent of less than £1 in many places in Thailand.

It's a dish that's steeped in nationalism

It's a relatively new dish, which can be traced back to a phase of ultra-nationalism in the early 1930s, when a democratic system emerged from the ruins of the country's absolute monarchy.

The then prime minister Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram held a public contest to find a new national noodle dish – and the winning dish was remarkably similar to the one we know as Pad Thai today.

It wasn't just a cookery contest: part of the plan was to weaken the influence of China by moving away from the consumption of wheat noodles which were popular at the time.

The dish is particularly popular at Thai street food markets

Despite the name, it's not very Thai

The dish uses thin sen chan rice noodles which are very similar to those used in the Vietnamese noodle dish pho, and few of the ingredients are native to Thailand.

The dish bears more similarity to Chinese cuisine that Thai cuisine, and it's believed that the cooking of pan-fried noodles was widespread among Chinese immigrants in the country long before the cooking contest took place.

It's tastier than lasagne, gelato or croissants

That's according to a major poll of foodies by CNN Go in 2011, which placed at number five on a list of the tastiest dishes in the world.

The top dish was beef rendang from Malaysia, followed by Indonesian nasi goreng, sushi, and another Thai dish - tom yam goong.

Pad Thai is tastier than croissants and gelato, according to foodies

The secret to a good Pad Thai is patience and a large pan

A larger surface area encourages evaporation, and cooking fewer portions at once is key to avoiding clumps of oily sticky noodles.

There's a scientific reason it's so delicious

The dish, when made correctly, hits all five flavour profiles in the mouth; salty, sour, sweet, spicy and bitter.