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Stir Fried Water Spinach
An essential dish, both in homestyle cooking and at restaurants. Pak Boong is a very common vegetable in Thailand, as well as other South East Asian countries. To cook something “Fai Daeng” means over a really hot fire. Fai means fire, and Daeng means red, so your heat must be all the way up!
Directions
- Lightly smash the chilies. Smash the garlic and remove the skin. Set aside. Wash the water spinach and shake it dry. Prepare the vegetable by breaking off the leaves at the base, and then breaking the stems with your hands at about 1.5″ intervals. Leave the top last part of stem intact with the top 2 leaves on. See picture to the right for an example.
- Heat your wok to HIGH HIGH HIGH. If your pan is not hot, the vegetables will die a slow death and taste terrible. If you’re using an electric stove, leave the stove on high for about 3-5 minutes with the pan full of oil sitting on top. This should get it as hot as it’s supposed to be. You want almost smoking oil, where the oil is dancing around in the pan.
- Throw the garlic in, stir quickly until it just starts to turn light brown. If your pan is hot enough, this should be less than 10 seconds. Then throw the vegetable in with the chilies. It should sizzle like crazy. Flip the vegetables and spread out a few times to make sure they evenly cook. Then add the water, bean sauce & oyster sauce, and stir for maybe 1 more minute, until the vegetable is finished. They’re done when the leaves are dark green and wilted and the stem is medium green. Don’t overcook, or they’ll taste bad.
Note:
This dish is very easy to make vegetarian by using vegetarian oyster sauce instead of regular oyster sauce. There are a few different brands of vegetarian oyster sauce, made from mushrooms instead of oysters. Sometimes the label says 'vegetarian stir fry sauce'.
(23 votes, average: 3.87 out of 5)
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Ingredients: What You'll Need
- 2 tablespoons smashed whole garlic cloves
- 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 3-5 red smashed medium-sized thai chilies
- 1 teaspoon salted bean paste
- 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
- 20 stems of water spinach
- 1 tablespoon water
it’s so easy! i tried it! never loved veggies so much. =)
that is cambodian too, not really pure thai recipe.
Lizz -
Actually, the origin of this recipe is Chinese. I believe the Chinese brought it both to Thailand and Cambodia. And I don’t think that Cambodians add chilies when they cook it.
I love water spinach, I can eat this stuff all day. I concur with cee that this actually originated from China. There’s a great chinese version where instead of bean and oyster sauce, you can use those salty fermented bean curds.
well.. for the sake of knowledge
usually here in Thailand, the chef will heat the wok (with oil) enough so that when he throw in the Pak Boong along with some water (or broth), the FLAME will erupt from the wok!!
Sceintifically, with enough IMIDIATE heat, molecule of water will dispatch (sorry, it seems my english is not good enough to find the proper term) into OXYGEN and HYDROGEN. With Hydrogen as the fuel and Oxygen as the oxidant (again, forgive my poor english) and the flame will blow up from the wok!!
It’s quite a show. Actually it’s a show!! There are restaurants that do this as a customer entertainment, as well as vague number of street foods stall.
Hence, the name RED FLAME(FIRE) is occupied.
Hi any one know where I can get this type of spinach from ? I am in Melbourne
Cheers
most thai or chinese groceries carry water spinach. you can use google to find one near you:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=thai+grocery+melbourne
http://www.google.com/search?&q=chinese+grocery+melbourne
This can be made with almost any leafy spinach like green. Regular spinach, snow pea leaves, etc. I can’t always find water spinach so I improvise.
This is a great dish, I really can smell the oil now heating up while I’m wrtiting up, ammm very yummy dish, we cook it very often, and just loved it
This sauce can literally be used with almost all vegetable stirfries. Try it with asparagus, mushrooms & Chinese brocholi, or my favorite….cauliflower!!! Give it a try.
What a great and easy recipe! I just made a batch using 5 Korean peppers (I didn’t have any Thai peppers)it came out very tasty. Can’t wait to try it with Thai peppers. Thanks for posting your recipe!!
I so fell in love with dish Pak Boong (Morning Glory) while in Indonesia but find it hard to buy over here
Pak boong is also called ong choy, in case that helps anyone. I saw it as ong choy at an Asian grocery store today. Thanks for the recipe!