How do you make sauce for a Thai dish such as Chicken Pad Khing?
I just joined the other day after much lurking. Figured, I could help with this question. When I worked in a Thai restaurant, I had a couple of staple stir-fry sauces on hand. The basic one I had come up with had the folllowing:


1 part thin (white) soy
2 parts dark (black) soy
1 part Golden Mountain brand soy (as this imparts a little bit of a different taste than the other thin soys imo, but really, it's just a thin soy, ultimately)
1 part fish sauce
5 parts oyster sauce
1 part cornstarch


The sauce will last forever, covered in the pantry or fridge. You'd just need to stir it up before using and, aside from being so versatile (with the exception of coconut soups, I may have put some of this in every Thai dish we served), the great thing is your dishes will be consistent. I'd just make it up in 5 gallon buckets and fill my little jug that I kept wok-side from the walk-in bucket. From this basic sauce, I would add sugar, vinegar, and hots to it to make a drunken noodle stir-fry sauce, or thickeners to it to make the sauces for other noodle dishes. My aunt likes to add Maggi to her stir fry base, but I don't like the way Maggi sauce smells. One of my employees would throw in a handful of fried garlic and vegetable oil to her sauce, and that was a great addition that saved a couple steps in the cooking process. You can totally make this sauce your own.

The basic stir fry sauce (a few tablespoons) is added to vegetable stock (a good bit, at least 1/2 cup) in stir fry recipes and if I wanted a dish to have more sauce, like I always do in Gai Pad Khing, I'd add more stock and more stir fry base, tasting as I go along and usually having to add a few more teaspoons of sugar for my tastes, letting it reduce a little bit in the pan, then finishing it off with a ton of white pepper, again, my tastes. And I'd usually not use a thickener in this dish, because my dad didn't use thickener when he made it for me growing up.

And, the fish sauce smell doesn't really go away when it's cooked. I'd avoid adding more than a single tablespoon to any one dish.

Hope that helps!

Source: I'm Thai, have been cooking Thai food for 20plus years.