To fully immerse ourselves in Chiang Mai, we decided, along with my friend Emily, to try a Thai cooking class.
We found a great one, Thai Farm Cookery School, it promised organic farm grown produce and a huge choice of meals to cook, in which we would cook 5 dishes in total.
We were picked up from our apartment, met our guide and instructor and then were driven to a local market, where we were shown all the different types of herbs, spices, veggies, meat and condiments we would be using. We got a chance to check out everything, although we didn’t buy anything as at least 70% of the ingredients were grown on their farm.
After an hour long drive we arrived and were asked to put on red aprons, and sombreros (to keep the heat off i guess?!) Then shown around the farm, we looked at several herbs and spices we would use, including a tamarind tree and lemongrass.
Our group was relatively small, just 8 including us, and we each had our own prep area and gas burner.
Our menu was chosen the previous day, we each selected different dishes so we could try each others afterwards, there was a choice of red/green/yellow curry, veggie/chicken coconut soup, or prawn spicy soup, sweet & sour/cashew nut/spicy basil leaf chicken, pad thai/thick soy/veggie noodles, and for dessert we all chose mango with sticky rice (my personal fave).
First we made our curry pastes for later, which involved a lot of pounding of ingredients, it was so tiring!
Next we made our soup. I chose coconut chicken and Greg chose tom yum goong.
Greg’s soup
Then we made our curries using the paste we’d made.
My red curry
Next it was stir fries. This was our demonstration!
We didn’t think it was a great idea to try and copy this..
Finally it was time to eat.
Greg’s chicken and holy basil (Pad Kra Pao Gai)
Though there was so much food a lot of it had to go into doggy bags to take home.
We also picked this unusual fruit for which one of the staff made a tasty chilli and fish sauce dip.
After lunch we made our noodle dishes, followed by our mango sticky rice dessert. We ate that there but the noodles we took away.
At the end of a very tiring long day of full on cooking, we were given a recipe book containing every dish on the menu plus papaya salad which they made in front of us, during our sit down lunch.
It really was a day well spent, we had learnt so much and filled ourselves to bursting on so much good Thai food. We would definitely recommend the course, it’s great value and good fun.
We paid 1300THB per person for our course
