Tim Freeman cooked pad thai in Montana — or rather, was the kind of chef who worked in Montana and was good enough to beat Bobby Flay at pad thai, which is a sentence that deserves to sit for a moment. He was executive chef at the Northern Hotel in Billings before moving to the Overland Park Convention Center in Kansas. The geography has nothing to do with the food, which was the point.
His pad thai succeeded through tamarind calibration. Most competition versions under-sour because tamarind paste varies in concentration and cooks are conservative with it; Freeman ran his at a 1:1:1 ratio of tamarind-to-fish-sauce-to-palm-sugar by weight, then tasted and adjusted — building the sweet-sour-salt balance before the noodles went in. His rice noodles soaked in cold water rather than boiling, which keeps them pliable without pre-cooking them, so they absorbed the wok sauce rather than sitting in it.
Cold-soaked noodles in a wok are a cook who has done the homework. Bobby's pad thai came in sweeter than sour, which is the most common miss and the easiest to avoid if you taste as you go.
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