This Low Carb Pad Thai recipe is easy to make and features an authentic Pad Thai sauce.

If you’re wondering how to make Pad Thai, you’ve come to the right place!

Pad Thai is probably the most famous Thai street food delicacy there is. It’s sold everywhere. Outside of Thailand, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Thai restaurant that doesn’t have Pad Thai on the menu.

I usually grab a Chicken Pad Thai (pad thai gai), Shrimp Pad Thai (goong), or an Egg Pad Thai (pad thai khi).

Why A Low Carb Pad Thai?

Our rendition of an authentic Pad Thai recipe is one with a healthy ketogenic diet mindset, but also uses strictly Paleo ingredients.

It’s a KETO Pad Thai.

Veggie noodles and NO canola oil.

Pad Thai will never let you down. It’s always delicious, every time. It’s a perfect late night munchie meal or an impressive dinner plate to have alongside a few other authentic Thai recipes on a special homemade dinner occasion. It’s easy to make and hard to mess up. You know what you get every time. You’ll find various types of Pad Thai recipes online. Ours is low carb but the veggie noodles taste the same (better even!).

Let us get on with the recipe…

Pad Thai Garnishes

When you order it to-go, it comes with a little fish sauce packet that usually has a few slices of chili swimming in it (I always add the sauce and leave off the little chili slices), another spicy, clear sauce that I never use, crushed red chili peppers, bean sprouts, chives, and lastly, lime wedges. These are part of the Pad Thai recipe. They are not optional.

• bean sprouts
• green onion
• lime wedge
• fish sauce (optional)
• red chili flakes (optional)

Our Keto Pad Thai recipe uses all these garnishes, plus a few simple low carb modifications:

• vegetable noodles
• walnuts
• coconut oil for cooking

This recipe is everything you want and need in a Pad Thai, but without the traditional noodle carbs and canola oil stirfry.

Types of Pad Thai

• Chicken Pad Thai
• Egg Pad Thai: Pad Thai will always have an egg scrambled into it. Pad Thai “Khi”, or Egg Pad Thai, calls for an additional egg or two.
• Pork Pad Thai
• Shrimp Pad Thai
• Vegan Pad Thai
• Beef Pad Thai
• Our Keto Pad Thai

On the day we documented this recipe, I had a lot of pork in the freezer from the farmer’s market that month. I did not want it to sit in the freezer too long. That’s why this recipe uses pork belly. I’d actually recommend doing the chicken, egg or shrimp versions just as much. They’re quicker to make too.

For this particular recipe, we made a little egg blanket and wrapped it inside to make it like a DIY pad thai where you can mix the ingredients together as you want.

Now onto the recipe.

Here is what we’re cooking with. The carrots and zucchini have already been spiralized with my handheld gadget. And the shallots, onions, crispy pork and tofu have already been shopped and sliced.

In this image above, we’ve already sliced and peeled all the ingredients. Ling then made a tamarind flavored water by squeezing and squishing around tamarind fruit in a small bowl of mineral water.

Note: This is a step that other Pad Thai recipes you find online might not have. It’s not a crucial step to achieve a luscious Pad Thai taste, but if you are able to get a hold of some tamarind, I’d suggest adding this step in for the very very best Pad Thai. But best is relative, and the very best Pad Thai I’ve ever had actually didn’t have it in there. So there’s that.

Keto Pad Thai Recipe Ingredients:

1. pork belly (or egg, chicken, shrimp)
2. organic eggs
3. tofu
4. green onion
5. bean sprouts
6. tamarind fruit or paste (for Pad Thai sauce)
7. zucchini noodles
8. carrot noodles
9. walnuts
10. tasteless coconut oil for cooking
11. shallots
12. lime
13. avocado (not a traditional ingredient – my keto modification)
14. chili flakes
15. fish sauce
16. stevia tea (from dried stevia leaves)
17. coconut aminos (instead of the traditional soy sauce)

The fish sauce, coconut aminos and tamarind paste for making the Pad Thai sauce are all available on Amazon:

Step 1. Use Tamarind To Make Pad Thai Sauce

First, you need to make a tamarind-based Pad Thai sauce. You can use fresh tamarind fruit or a canned, bottled or jarred tamarind paste. The paste is usually already deseeded and it’s jarred.

How to make the tamarind Pad Thai sauce: Squeeze and play around with the tamarind paste inside a bowl of room temperature water. Then, add the red chili flakes and fish sauce to the tamarind water you just made by squeezing the fruit or paste in water. This is your Pad Thai sauce. Most authentic Pad Thai recipes you’ll discover use this water-based tamarind sauce.

After you’ve mushed out the flavor from the tamarind, strain it, then you should be left with only the flavored tamarind water.

Next, add ingredients to the tamarind water.

Here’s what you will add to it:

• fish sauce
• red chili flakes
• coconut aminos (why coconut aminos?)

Where to find tamarind fruit?

You can find tamarind online if you can’t find it locally.

You can purchase fresh tamarind, as it stores well, especially when refrigerated. Or there are good paste options as well. Here is one popular tamarind paste. After you’ve added the fish sauce, chili flakes, and coconut aminos, cook the egg blanket if you’re making the Pad Thai as we are here. Otherwise, skip the egg blanket and just stir your eggs in with everything.

A bit of coconut oil over low heat and just one egg was placed inside.

Note: This egg blanket is an optional step. Most pad thai recipes don’t use this.

Step 2. Keto Pad Thai Stir Frying

That flap of egg or the egg blanket you see in the glass Tupperware container is the optional part. What I usually do, and prefer to do when not trying to get fancy, is simply scramble in that egg into what we saute at this step.

Step 3. Chives and Bean Sprouts

After your little egg blanket is finished, Put the shallots and tofu in the saute pan first. Cook them in some tasteless coconut cooking oil for a bit before adding in more ingredients.

Next, put the bean sprouts and chives in. Continue sauting, mixing over medium heat.

Leave some sprouts on the side, as you will mix in fresh bean sprouts into the finished Pad Thai at the end.

Step 4. Add Pad Thai Sauce

Earlier we made a tamarind water and then added these 3 sauces to it:

• coconut aminos
• fish sauce
• stevia tea

This tamarind water Pad Thai blend is what you now add to the saute that’s cooking up your chives, bean sprouts, tofu and shallots.

After this step, we add in pork that we previously cooked in coconut oil. It’s a coconut oil battered pork that popped grease all over my walls and floor while cooking. Next time I’m making a regular chicken Pad Thai. Once you add in the pork at this step, it starts to really look like an authentic Pad Thai! Check it out.

This is where we’re at right now:

But since this is a keto Pad Thai, the next step will make most authentic Pad Thai lovers make weird faces.

Step 5. Carrot and Zucchini Noodles

You can see we used zucchini and carrot to make our noodles.

You can spiralize your zucchini, or you can use a little handy vegetable spiralizer to make your Pad Thai noodles. This cheap, little veggie spiralizer works perfectly. I’ve seen those spiralizer machines, but I don’t use one currently. I’m sure it’s great, but I prefer this little tool in the image below. I really don’t want is another wonky tool that requires cleanup and storage, so I just use one of these little awesome veggie noodle making kitchen tools.

How to use the hand-held vegetable noodle maker: Wash your carrots and zucchini properly, then shave off the outer layers. Firmly press your vegetable spiralizer against the carrot or zucchini, and slide it away from your body, longways, in one direction. Do this over a bowl to let your vegetable noodles fall down into it.

These will then be tossed into your Pad Thai stir-fry towards the end.

This tiny little thing that I picked up for maybe a dollar or two at the local market works wonders in the kitchen. You can see how nicely it makes noodles. After you’ve started cooking your noodles, add another egg to the saute on top of everything else that’s cooking. Like so:

And that’s pretty much it! A pretty easy pad thai recipe, eh?

An Authentic Pad Thai Recipe

You can see we left fresh bean sprouts on the side as these are mixed into the final Pad Thai once it’s finished cooking. We also mix in some fresh chives. Since this is our fancy “Keto” Pad Thai wrapped in an egg blanket, look at how it turned out.

These are the fresh Pad Thai garnishes once again:

• bean sprouts
• chives
• chili pepper flakes
• lime wedge

These are our Nutrition Adventures-version healthy modifications:

• coconut oil instead of canola oil
• walnuts instead of peanuts
• avocado because they’re in season and they go with all Thai food:)

The avocado helps push this Pad Thai into low carb high fat diet territory. In my experience, and without meaning to brag, eating low carb high fat foods is much easier with great recipes such as our low carb Thai ones. There are many great low carb high fat recipes out on the web as well.

Normally, this is served on a regular plate, stirred together. Then I’d sprinkle fresh, crispy bean sprouts, chili flakes, green onions and lime juice onto it. The walnuts and avocado are my additions. They blend perfectly to these ingredients and help fulfill macronutrient goals for the day if you’re on a low carb high fat or ketogenic diet.

Our low carb Pad Thai noodles recipe was a complete success.

The authentic taste-test

This Keto Pad Thai recipe passes the test in flying colors.

The taste factor.. 100% authentic.

The carrot and zucchini noodles were a wonderful idea. They do not change the flavor which is the weirdest thing. They simply provide a perfect replacement for noodles. Their texture is very much like noodles and what you end up eating is something that tastes exactly like an authentic Pad Thai, because it is an authentic Pad Thai.. but with a healthy keto + Paleo twist!

Here is the printable Keto Low Carb Pork Belly Pad Thai Recipe Card.

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