Cabbage-Phad Thai--not just for dieters

Sure, Sunshine. Most efficient might be to say that the keys to success here are the sauce as well as the cabbage. The sauce and other preparation I take pretty much exactly from this link, expect that I used tofu and chicken-thigh rather than the pork and shrimp:

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/kuay-tiaw-pad-thai-recipe-2131125

As to the cabbage, you can follow this treatment and thereafter use the cabbage more or less as you would softened rice noodles:

  1. I took 1 small-to-medium head of green cabbage. Slice the head in half lengthwise, and then slice the half again lengthwise, resulting in quarter-head lengths. Half of the head was enough for two recipes from the link above, so basically you want a quarter head per preparation.

  2. Working with however many quarters you need, slice the quarters lengthwise into shreds about rice noodle width. Given the geometry, that means cutting at changing angles, so that you are always slicing toward the center of the head. Take the shreds to a colander and sprinkle with kosher salt, rather liberally because the salt will later be rinsed off. Let this sit in colander in a sink (it will drain water) for at least an hour or two, periodically messing it up with your hands to keep the salt-effect moving around. As the cabbage softens, I grab chunkier bits whenever I’m messing it up and discard them, because I want to keep the cabbage relatively light and uniform in texture and size.

  3. Before using, rinse the cabbage vigorously to shed salt. Place in prep bowl and use pretty much as you would rice noodles from here on, with this exception: because cabbage can vary in how much water it has retained, I alter the cooking order a bit from the recipe link. I don’t start with garlic, as I use high heat. Instead, I put the proteins into hot oil with a portion of the chile flakes, adding garlic after a minute or so, when the high heat is a bit tamed. When the proteins are mostly cooked, I remove all the wok ingredients to a plate, and the stir-fry the cabbage alone to determine if it’s exuding much moisture. If it is, I boil most of that off, so that there is little water left and frying temperatures can therefore be attained. The oil in the pan can look like water, but once you hear the cabbage beginning to sizzle, you know the water is not running the show anymore. From there on out, everything is just as if using rice noodles.

I think I might actually like this more than the usual rice noodle prep, because the cabbage adds some flavor (where rice noodles really don’t), but the cabbage does not have any of that cruciferous smell somehow. It’s subtle and not assertively cabbagey. Good luck!

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