Why Pad Thai in US taste sweet?
 

The first time I tried the famous Thai Dish Pad Thai was in Khao San Road in Bangkok. It was sold on the streets and it tasted so good and fresh.

But when I later tried it in US, in some small restaurants and at PF Changs and Pei Wei, they taste very different and they taste sweet. I hated it.

The one I tried and loved in BKK didn't taste sweet.


Any idea why it is different?

A different recipe, I'd guess.

Why Pad Thai in US taste sweet?
 

Pf changs owns pei Wei
I find pf changs far too sweet in general

Americans love sugary food
So catering to perceived American "taste"?

there are restaurants where you can find good/authentic food, but have to find them

Why Pad Thai in US taste sweet?
 

There are authentic Thai restaurants all over the place in the US. There is absolutely nothing Thai about PF Changs. Look up your local Thai restaurant and try it out.

There's a big difference between the Thai food made by Chinese in the US and Thai food made by Thais.

And also if you happen to have a restaurant with real Thais that 'Americanize' the menu, you can always ask them to make it authentic like it is in Thailand.

I would say that a good majority of the 'Asian' restaurants are Chinese owned and operated, and that can make a difference when I'm looking for authentic Japanese or Thai food.

This is easily avoidable in big cities.

Why Pad Thai in US taste sweet?
 

you had me at pf chang's - that's asian as taco bell is mexican!

On my recent visit to Pei wei, I asked them to not to add any sugar cos I didn't want my Pad Thai to taste sweet but when I ate it, it still tasted sweet though not too sugary. I tried one at a local Thai Restaurant and the Pad Thai there also tasted bit sweet.

I guess Pad thais are made with different tastes I guess. Also regarding the Mongolian beef, it is delicious but the ones sold by Peiwei is just too sweet. The one I usually eat at the local small chinese restaurant never tastes sweet.


I had this one in Khaosan road 3 yrs ago. so tasty, so fresh and so affordable!

Usually with Thai cuisine the sugar and chili are added as condiments. if you visited Khao San and went to a "take away" then the sugar was probably added by the vendor but very little if any as they would have expected you to add to what your palate enjoyed.

I am not sure you can call PF Chang's Chinese. Its American version of Chinese (heck, one half of PF Changs - PF - is not even Chinese!)

This

Asian food tries to balance sweet flavors with savory or spicy. American palates tend to prefer sweet.

I rarely eat Thai food in the US. One main reason is most of it is way too sweet for my tastes, even at Mom and Pop Thai owned restaurants after I ask them for authentic Thai style. The other main reason is the substitution of ingredients, especially chiles. Jalapenos, serranos, and bell peppers have no place in Thai cooking IMO.

All that said, Pad Thai does tend to be a bit on the sweet side even in Thailand. Not something I order anymore.

+1.

Everything in America tastes sweet to me.

Me too. I find the food in most chain restaurants there to be inedibly sweet.

Having just watched "The Search for General Tso" on Netflix, the short answer is that the American palette prefers a sweeter taste, and in response Asian restaurants add sugar to their food.

Just a bit off topic, as an American of German descent who has spent 15 years in Germany, I am always amused by Americans who complain about German cakes and pastries tasting bland.

To me they have a delicate sweetness that is far better than the sugar bombs we have here in the US.

Why Pad Thai in US taste sweet?
 

Love going to Europe to enjoy their pastries and biscuits/cookies because they are not as sweet as in the U.S.

To see Americans buying and enjoying orange chicken with rice at Panda Express, Yuck!
Such a sweet dish ! lol!

I love spicy savory taste! Not only that, I add more chilly or hot sauce.

That's probably why there are so many obese Americans.

We don't have any chain Asian locally, but quite a number of Thai, Korean, Philippine, Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants. The Chinese places are all over the map and hard to talk about collectively. I suppose that's good as it allows you to find the one that matches your taste. I would agree that in general, their food is far sweeter than "American" dishes. Even our Thai restaurants, although owned and operated by folks from Thailand, tend to be sweet. It's surprising, since my theory is that they cater to the 2 local military bases where I would expect patrons to know what the real thing tastes like. Interesting observation on the part of the OP. I hadn't considered it until now. I may just have to try a few new places to see what I can find.

BTW, not all European countries leave out the sugar. I challenge anyone to eat a weeks worth of dessert in Vienna without the urge to make a dentist appointment upon returning home.

Sugar where sugar belongs. A loaf of bread should not be sweet, but almost all US bread is horribly sweet, unless you buy the "artisan" type which would just be ordinary bread in other parts of the world.

I wouldn't call PF Chang a restaurant, and I wouldn't call the stuff they serve food.

As somebody that loves bread, and being in the SF Bay Area where sourdough comes from, I just never noticed any of the breads I eat having the slightest bit of sugar.

Most Americans don't. Sugar is pervasive in the American diet. To a foreigner it seems as though everything is sweetened. Even at higher end restaurants food often still has a certain sweetness to it.

Sourdough comes from San Francisco? That's a new one!;)

They are bland to me in that they don't have enough flavor, not that they don't have enough sugar. More cinnamon, or vanilla, or whatever the flavor is supposed to be. (I also don't generally like nut fillings in pastry)

I find that generally true, but equally in places like New York and San Fran you can get utterly authentic food from almost any country in the world. I've never seen such a wide range from amazing food to basically inedible in one country.

I think it might go back to early Thai restaurants in the USA having problems sourcing tamarind for the dish. So they'd substitute tomato ketchup to try to get roughly the same flavor profile, and if anyone complained about the ketchup, they'd say that, hey, it's a traditional SE Asian sauce and additive. Never mind that the original version of ketchup doesn't really resemble Euro-North American ketchup all that much. I also think that many North Americans go with the insanely hot spice level you can find in Thai food that helps balance out the sweet.

BamaVol- if you find yourself in Destin, I adore the massaman curry at Jasmine Thai over by Destin Fresh Market. I also don't think their pad thai is overly sweet- if I want a sweet noodle dish from there, I go with the pad kee maw.

Maybe in the fall. A little too hectic this time of year. Any possibility it's related to Jasmine in PCB?

PF Chang and Pei Wei serve Americanized Chinese food. In case of other SE Asian cuisine, they serve a version which has been Chinesed and then Americanized; double whammy!

If you want Thai food, find a Thai restaurant.

I can understand the desire to avoid summer US 98 traffic all too well. Not sure about common ownership with the other Jasmine.

Maybe I'm just the odd one out but when I eat Asian food "sweet" is not a word that ever entered my mind. Bread--sweet? Huh? :confused:

I support a plant in Pensacola and work out of Panama City. I made the mistake of coming back on 98 in late June and despite the extra 30 miles going on I-10, I'd have gotten back an hour earlier had I taken the northern route. I'm sure the locals know how to avoid what's avoidable, but even here sometimes there's just no way. We'll probably make a Bass Pro run some weekend in the fall and I'll look for it then.

Probably no relationship between the 2 restaurants. In PCB, it's spelled Jazmine. It's well regarded locally but I stay on my side of the bridge in the summer when possible and we have a neighborhood Thai place that we frequent - not my neighborhood - but a cozy family owned spot with local customers, unknown to the summer crowd.

All cheap American food seems to have sugar added to it from frozen dinners to takeaways to bread to cooked vegetables. If you're not used to it (especially when not used to HFCS) you really notice it. My mouth goes dry and I need to drink a ton of water.

I also notice on many US cooking programmes which get shown in the UK that everything from bread to cooked meats to salads appear to have huge amounts of sugar in them, usually with the comment "just to add a bit of sweetness" as if every single item of a meal needs its main taste balanced with sweetness.

Asian cuisine is a bit more complicated as many Asian sauces (including Thai, Cantonese, Malaysian and Japanese amongst others) do actually require some sugar as an ingredient, though you can't usually taste it.

But you're probably not eating Wonder Bread and the like. I think most bakery/artisanal breads have little to no sugar compared to the mass-produced junk. Some recipes call for a little sugar to give the yeast a bit of a nudge, but my favorite bread recipe calls for no sugar at all.

That's right. But outside of the US even the whitest, bog standard, mass produced bread does not have sugar added.

Here's a mass produced white bread in the US:

Wheat Flour Enriched ( Flour , Barley Malt , Ferrous Sulfate [ Iron ] , Vitamin B [ Niacin Vitamin B3 , Thiamine Mononitrate Vitamin B1 { Thiamin Vitamin B1 } , Riboflavin Vitamin B2 { Riboflavin Vitamin B2 } , Folic Acid Vitamin B9 ] ) , Water , Corn Syrup High Fructose , Contains 22% or less , Wheat Gluten , Salt , Soybeans Oil , Yeast , Calcium Sulphate , Vinegar , Monoglyceride , Dough Conditioners ( Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate , Calcium Dioxide ) , Soy Flour , Diammonium Phosphate , Dicalcium Phosphate , Monocalcium Phosphate , Yeast Nutrients ( Ammonium Sulfate ) , Calcium Propionate , To Retain Freshness

Here's a mass produced, supermarket white bread in Australia:

Wheat Flour, Water, Baker's Yeast, Vinegar, Iodised Salt, Canola Oil, Wheat Gluten, Soy Flour, Emulsifiers (481, 472e, 471), Vitamins (Thiamin, Folate).

My pizza dough recipe calls for 10 oz warm water, 1 teaspoon of sugar, one tablespoon of yeast, one teaspoon of salt, 2 cups whole wheat and 1.5 cups white flour. I don't worry too much about the 1 teaspoon of sugar, it gets added at the beginning to get the yeast going, I think because pizza dough is only let to rise one hour, once, rather than the 2 proofs you'd do for bread.

Pad thai in Thailand almost always uses tamarind paste for sweetness, whereas many renditions served in the US use sugar instead. Restaurants that use a more traditional recipe tend to have spice wheels on the tables, with three or four different condiments like in Thailand. Usually they are chile powder, fish sauce with diced bird's eye chile (nam plaa prik ki-noo), shrimp paste, and sugar.

Tamarind isn't sweet; it's sour.

[redacted] The food manufacturers try to hit the bliss point with cheap industrial ingredients. That means adding sugar just to the point where it's too sweet, adding salt the same way, etc. [redacted]

I can't get used to fish sauce because we don't eat fish or seafood. Therefor it has disgusting taste to us. I ordered some meals from a Sichuan Chinese restaurant. Spicy and nice but still tasted some fish sauce.

When we spent 3 weeks in Thailand, the most difficult experience was not getting food we wanted to eat. Every restaurant indoor or outside foot stalls put fish sauce on their dish. We tried but never worked. The only dish we kept eating for lunch and dinner for 2 weeks was " spicy basil chicken with rice" and we had to ask them not to put fish sauce. We loved it. We were very lucky to find an indian restaurant in Chiang Mai & Hua Hin where we went for lunch and dinner for 8 days. The food there tasted much better than the indian restaurants in US.

You must have been in incredibly remote parts of Thailand if you only had Thai food on offer.