Cooking School

Tuesday was Iron Chef day. I signed up for a cooking class set about 17 km outside of Chiang Mai on an organic farm, hoping to bring back some knowledge of how to create Thai culinary goodness back in the United States. On the menu for the day was a meal fit for a king: sticky rice, plain rice, red curry, cashew stir fry, papaya salad, pad thai, and mango with sticky rice. Yummy!

My cooking classmates were from all over - Australia, Holland, and San Francisco. We first visited a local market where we learned how to buy coconut milk and coconut cream, fish sauce, tofu, and rice. In Thailand you can buy anything from bugs to bananas to prepared sweets at the markets. Some of the best and cheapest food is found in markets, and as long as I keep a sense of culinary adventure (many things are wrapped in banana leaves, so I'm never sure exactly what I'm getting) I eat well. Here is a picture of an ingenious device many of the market stalls use to keep away flies. As far as I can tell, it is a ceiling fan with plastic bags instead of blades:


After our trip to the market, we drove into the countryside where, for the first time in weeks, the sound of cars and motorbikes was gone. We walked around the farm and learned about what all the ingredients for our dishes look like: long beans are VERY long, miniature eggplant (also called beetlenut) is very small, and peppers come in various sizes, the smaller the spicier.

The owner of the operation, Sawat, came to talk to us about the difficulties of farming organic in Thailand. Most farmers choose not to participate in organic farming because it is not economically feasible -- growing large quantities of the same crop increases that crop's susceptibility to disease, making pesticides desirable. If an organic farmer chooses to participate in mixed agriculture, disease resistance goes up but so do the labor costs of growing the food. Thus organic is best suited for farmers who are growing only small amounts of food (i.e. for the family only, not commercially).

Then the cooking commenced. First we learned about rice. Sticky rice is steamed, while "plain rice" (jasmine rice) is cooked in a rice cooker. Next we ground our own red curry. Red curry is red because it is prepared using dried red peppers, which are less spicy ("pet" in Thai) than the fresh green peppers used in green curry. Most Thai people buy already-prepared curries from the market, but hand-made curry is created by mashing ingredients together with mortar and pestle. Hard work!

The rest of the morning was spent preparing the curry dish, the cashew dish, and my very favorite Thai dish so far: green papaya salad (som tom). The setup made me feel as if I were on a commercial TV cooking show - I had my own cooking space, with all the ingredients laid out before me, ready to go into the dishes with only minimal chopping. After preparing all this food, we ate and ate and ate, and even with great effort could not finish our food. After lunch we prepared pad thai and mango with sticky rice. And yes, I now have a recipe book so I can wow everyone back at home with my attempts at creating Thai food.