I’m sure many people know this dish as the 514 from Simply Asia. It is one of their most popular dishes and is served with egg noodles, an assortment of peppers, chicken and cashew nuts. It does not contain many ingredients but is packed with flavour from the chili paste.

Due to the increasing costs of eating out, I tried to re-create this dish at home. In order to find out which ingredients to use I read about traditional chili pastes and eliminated ingredients that were too expensive to buy for a singular or that I did not have. Once I got this down to a few common ingredients that I had at home already it turned out to be a fairly simple process to make. This is by far the closest I have gotten to replicating that Simply Asia taste using minimal ingredients. Give it a go and tell me what you think!

Nam Prik Pao – Thai Chilli Paste Noodles

Ingredients for the chili paste:

• 1/2 onion roughly chopped
• 4-6 fresh red chili, chopped (use less if you don’t want it too hot or remove the seeds and white rib on the inside of the chili)
• 3 tsp chilli flakes
• enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan in a thin layer
• 2 Tb brown sugar
• 50ml brown vinegar

Method:

1. Heat oil in a frying pan on medium heat. Add the onion and chili and fry, Make sure everything is coated in oil. Add more if you need to. Add the chili flakes and fry until you see the color of the chili start to change and the oil taking on the color of the chili.
2. Add the sugar and vinegar and cook. You should start to have a nice caramelized mixture. Take this mixture to the furthest point of caramelization without burning it. If you are not sure don’t worry. The mixture should be thick now.
3. Take it off the heat and blend it until it is a paste.

Ingredients for the noodles:

• Egg noodles (see substitutes below)
• 2 chicken breasts, sliced at an angle
• 1/4 red, green pepper.
• 2 spring onion, sliced
• 2 TB soya sauce
• 1/2 onion quartered into petal pieces.
• Cashews
• Chilli paste

Method:

1. In the same pan that you made the chili paste in or a wok, heat some oil on high heat. Cook the chicken, peppers, onion pieces and cashews in half the chili paste mixture that you made.
2. Add the egg noodles, soya sauce and toss until coated evenly.
3. Lastly add the spring onion before serving.

Tips:

The darker you take the chili paste to in the beginning stages of cooking the darker it will be when adding it to the noodles. If you struggled with this step just fry it in the pan for a bit before adding the chicken and veggies. You can add any veggies you like, personally I don’t like a lot of green peppers and prefer mushrooms, green beans, carrots. If you want your noodles extra spicy use all of the chili paste. If not use less. It can keep in the fridge as there is sugar in it, but add some oil to cover.