Love Thai food but don’t know how to prepare it? Then this half-day cooking class in Bangkok is perfect for you.
This sultry Monday morning, students from England, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Canada and the US have come together to learn a little more about a common love of Thai food.
‘My dream is to prepare a complete meal for my friends,” says a pony-tailed brunette from Chicago, confessing she can’t cook. The course appeals to neophytes and experts. A professional chef from London, who saw the course advertised on the Internet, plans to take lessons for a week. “I’ve tried Thai recipes, but always improvised,” he says. Two friends from Hong Kong are taking the class “because we like Thai food” says one, admitting his cooking skills amount to heating spaghetti sauce and boiling pasta.
While I love Thai food, my skills at preparing it are limited to making packets of instant Thai noodles.
A cheery Thai-Belgian whose mother is Blue Elephant’s founding partner and director of this fabulous place offers us a welcome drink of refreshing lemongrass ice tea. “We boil it with fresh lemongrass stem,” says Cheerful Thai-Belgian, who is studying under Khun Nooror’s tutelage to be a teacher, too. “When you see your mother cooking for over 20 years, it kind of grows on you,” she says.
Morning classes include a visit to a traditional Thai market, Bang Rak. A quick Sky-train trip and we are immersed in the dimly lit, bustling bazaar. No foreigners come here, Lanes are narrow, people are shouting.
You’re in their territory.” It is indeed the real thing, not tidied up or brightened for visitors. At the jackfruit stand, we sample tasty slivers of the orange fruit and see unripe mangoes, plump green ovals that are delicious in salads very crunchy, says Sandra. At the spice stand are bags of garlic, shallots and dry chilies, all used in curry paste. “Green curry is spicier than red, because fresh chilies are used, whereas red curry uses dry,” she explains.
At the traditional Thai coffee and tea stall, Melissa volunteers to help make the ice teas, pouring the tea through a long, old fashioned filter. There is even a coconut-milk stall, where fresh coconut is soaked in water, then put in a machine and compressed with the milk finally squeezed out in to a bucket, “just like cow’s milk”, says Sandra.
Another stand has wild ginger, kaffir lime fruit that to me looks like a knobby lime-green golf ball galangal, fresh lemongrass, and purple-leafed banana flowers used in salads, baby aberigines, tiny eggplants, sweet basil and holy basil.
Back at the school, our theory class is about to begin. But we are stranded by monsoon-like rains, quite uncharacteristic during this normally dry season. “This is the Indiana Jones cooking class,” says Sandra, as we dash through the downpour for the shelter of taxis, then drip our way up the schools stairs.