Making pad thai at home is surprisingly easy. The key is balancing the dish’s sweet, salty, sour, spicy, and bitter flavors. In this video, Corinne Trang teaches you how to prepare and stir-fry several Thai ingredidents to achive the right mix of flavor and texture for an authentic and delicious pad thai.

“The key to perfect pad thai is to balance the sweet, salty, sour, spicy, and bitter flavors, which make the dish so delicious,” says teacher, chef, and author Corinne Trang. To achieve the right mix of flavor and texture, Corinne uses several Thai ingredients, including tamarind, palm sugar, and fish sauce. In this video, she shows us how to prep those ingredients, and the right way to stir-fry them. The pad thai is finished with traditional garnishes of mung bean sprouts, fresh Thai basil, fiery chiles, peanuts, scallions, and wedges of lime. “All these textures and flavors,” says Corinne, “make for delicious harmony in the wok” (see the Test Kitchen tip for how to season a wok).

Get the recipe: Authentic Pad Thai