We Tried Bangkok’s Explosive Fire Wok Stir Fry

[fire roaring]

Welcome to Bangkok Chinatown Yaowarat.

Look how busy it is on a Sunday night.

This is a restaurant called Fikeaw.

They're known for seafood stir fry,

but we're only here to watch one thing,

[fire roaring]

pad fai dang, which is an amazing stir fry technique,

but it's not just for a show, it's actually for flavor.

Come this way.

[fire roaring] What?

[person laughing]

Okay. This fire explosion happens on a regular basis.

Now, as I said, this place is known for their seafood.

They're grilling the lobsters, oysters.

We could have spent all episode looking

at all the other dishes that they do,

but this stir fry technique is ridiculous.

Fire, flame, and then smoke everywhere.

But while that happens, this is the setup.

You come to a lot

of these stir fry restaurants in Chinatown.

You look at your ingredients and you look at what's fresh

and you decide what you wanna eat.

I think a lot of the lobster is for show.

They're big, they're impressive, they're fun

to take pictures of, but the real technique

is down to the stir fry.

The stir fry is typically applied to water spinach,

nice tender leaves, thick chewy stems,

and they're hollow in the middle

and like a bucatini, like a penne,

because it's hollow in the middle, it's gonna catch a lot

of that delicious sauce.

I think chef is getting ready for another one.

You can see in there.

That's water spinach, prepped, clean, plucked.

Inside of that water spinach plate are a couple of things.

First, his aromatics, his flavors, so chili,

tiny famous Thai garlic, salt, sugar, MSG,

a little bit of liquid soy sauce and oyster sauce,

and a little bit of soybean paste,

which is what you see right here.

That's the secret. A little bit of water.

He's gonna get it really, really nice and hot

when he's dropping that water spinach

into the smoking hot wok

and it's all just gonna go kaboom.

Usually adding relatively cold water to hot oil,

horrible, horrible idea because it's splutters,

but spluttering is exactly what they want.

What the chef is looking for

is this thing we call emulsification.

They want violent movement that's gonna tie and bind the oil

and water together as it jumps,

and that's when you get cohesive flavor.

Second reason for this stir fry

is what we call in Chinese cooking wok hei.

As it touches the wok, it's gonna sear,

all the sugar's gonna caramelize.

You're gonna get color, and then once you toss it up

in the air, fire on the side is gonna lick it.

That's what wok hei is all about,

and this is wok hei to the maximum.

All that oil's just like past the smoking temp, smoking out

after like five tosses, and you see how tender it is

and that liquid on the bottom, fully emulsified.

[dramatic music]

[host speaking in foreign language]

Thank you.

Okay, typical dish, you'll find it

at a lot of Thai restaurants,

but when you know it's good is if they have that boom.

You can only get that emulsification

if you're really moving the oil particles

and the water particles so it becomes one.

And this should be delicious enough.

It's, woo, ridiculous.

All those elements are in all the aromatics, salty, savory,

spicy, all tied together.

A little bit of that fattiness from the lard, so good.

Lard also explains the lower smoking point,

which is why it smokes up by so much.

Garlic-y, faintly spicy,

but the primary savory element is the soybean paste,

Thai-style soybean paste, which is half blended,

but they keep some of it for texture.

The hardier stems are crispy, they're crunchy.

When it's cooked,

it activates all these like sweet spinach flavors

that you wouldn't be able to get

without cooking it properly.

Here's that famous tiny garlic,

and look at how soft this garlic is.

He stir fried this for 10 seconds.

I'm totally making these numbers up,

but he's at least 750, 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

This restaurant's called Fikeaw.

Fi, fire, keaw, breathe

for this table cloth,

but also the implication that hotter than red

is that green-blue frame.

The first time we asked chef

before it got so busy about this technique,

he said, you can use pad fai dang

for sauces that need emulsifying for like seafood dishes.

[host speaking in foreign language]

All right, thank you.

Okay.

That is what we call emulsification, garlic, chilies,

Sichuan peppercorn, basil, Makrut lime leaf,

clams, shrimp, squid,

some red onion, a little bit of ginger,

nice fresh, sweet clams, but mostly, this sauce together.

Everything that was meant

to be in this dish is now in this bite.

With mixed seafood dishes,

it's always difficult because different sea foods cook

at different times.

All this comes down to the chef's experience

and is handle on the wok.

One thing I can point out, these green peppercorns.

Green peppercorns are technically unripe peppercorns.

This was here before the chili pepper,

and this was therefore the main agent

through which we got that numbing,

tingling spice feeling in their mouth.

It's not technically a taste, right? It's a feeling.

The taste itself is fruity,

but these peppercorns are really hard to come by

outside of regions that grow them.

They go bad very, very quick.

You'll often see them in other places like the US

in an Asian supermarket, pickled or brined.

But when you have them fresh,

they really contribute to the sauce.

They're so tender, they're spicy, but they're not too spicy,

and they have a burst of fruitiness, really special.

One of those special dishes that just you can only get

when you're in a place like here, like Chinatown in Bangkok.

[fire hissing]

That explosion, it's for show.

I mean, they named this restaurant

after that flame technique, but it's also there for flavor.

That's what I love about so much of street eats.

It's as much of a spectacle as it can be,

but usually, 90% of the time there's good reason for it,

and it produces delicious results

that you can see all over Thai cooking

in the restaurants, all over Bangkok, Chinatown.