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Thai Cooking School

By jeni | November 12, 2008

One thing Thailand is known for, and especially Chiang Mai, is cooking school. Of all of the cuisines I’ve tried while in Asia, Thai food is far and away my favorite. I love the ingredients – coconut milk, peanuts, papaya, hot chiles, curry, banana – I could go on and on. The great thing about Thai food, besides of course, it’s delicious taste, is that it’s relatively easy to make. So with hope in our hearts and hunger in our bellies, Amy and I hit Chiang Mai’s “first and most famous” Thai cooking school, aptly named the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School.

We had an absolute blast. This was one of my favorite things I did while in Thailand, and if you go I absolutely recommend you try this out. So much fun. And informative too. 🙂

We started the  morning with a trip to the local market, where our instructors showed off some local ingredients and explained how we would be using them in our dishes.

Behold the vegetables…

Here our instructor is explaining how they use every last bit of the coconut to get the water, the meat, coconut milk and coconut cream.

And the spices… so. many. spices.

A little kid driving a motor bike through the market (not really of course, but it looked like it)

After about an hour wandering around the market and learning all about galangal and other mysterious ingredients, we all climbed back into the bed of the truck (that was an experience in and of itself) and hit the road to cook some food.

First up, one of my favorite Thai dishes and my favorite of the day, chicken in coconut milk soup, or Tom Kha Gai. I was a little nervous at first, but soon realized I absolutely could not fail because pretty much all the prep work was done for me. It worked like this: our class of six sat in a little room and watched a demonstration of the dish being cooked, complete with upside-down mirror so we could see what was in the instructor’s pot, and then we went out to our own stations to try to recreate what we had just seen. For every dish our ingredients were provided for us, all we had to do was a tiny bit of measuring, chopping and then or course the actual cooking. No frantically flipping open cabinet doors because I forgot this or that, no running next door to the neighbors for an egg. Now I see why celebrity chefs make it look so easy. Because all of their assistants are doing the actual hard labor.

The demonstration:

So, once back at our respective stations after the first demonstration, we chopped a few veggies, got the pan (with oil already inside) hot, and then went at it. After each dish we sat and tried a bit, then went to watch another demonstration, and when we came back out, each cooking station had been miraculously cleaned and set up with new ingredients for the next dish. Amazing!

Here’s the Tom Kha Gai:

Next up was Raad Nah Muu, or fried, big noodles with thick sauce. This was my least favorite of the dishes, but still pretty good. It used tapioca flour as a thickening agent, like cornstarch. I guess neither Amy or I took a picture of this one, but it looked like mushy brown big noodles.

Next, Gaeng Phed Plaa (red curry with fish) and then Phad Hed Ruam Khao Pod Orn (fried mixed mushrooms with baby corn). We cooked these one after another and then enjoyed together for lunch.

The veggies:

And the curry:

You can see my cooking station there behind me to the left. See how proud I am? I made that!

After the lunch break, we got back to it, making a fantastic Khanom Kluay (steamed banana cake) first because it had to go in the steamer. It’s basically a banana, some sugar, flour, coconut and tapioca flour all mashed up together and steamed for thirty minutes. Delicious.

Finally we were ready for our last dish, which was a team effort. I would have rather had this earlier in the day as it was really nice and fresh, a good starter, but I guess they saved it for last so we could all make it together. Som Tam (papaya salad) is a really famous Thai dish that uses green papaya shreds and is super spicy (unless you tame it up, which they did for us, and it was still super spicy). You make it by pounding all the ingredients in this big bowl pounder thingy (sorry for the lame description). So one person chops, one person pounds, and one person carves pretty vegetables. I got to chop, Amy got to carve and dude next to me got to pound. I wanted to pound but I wasn’t really in the mood to fight him for it so I let him. I think he needed to get some aggression out anyway.

Here’s the finished product. Sorry for the blurry photo.

See that tomato flower? Amy carved that.

And that, my friends, is Thai cooking school. See how fun it was? I would love to go back and learn more – Amy and I have even been discussing throwing a Thai dinner party when I get home to Colorado, provided of course we can find all the ingredients and remember what the heck we’re supposed to do. All I know is that we need fish sauce. Lots and lots of fish sauce.

P.S. Thanks to my sister Amy for providing some of the photos.

Topics: food, sightseeing, Thailand, traveling | No Comments »

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