Pai Cookery Class, Thailand

For Christmas break this year, my family visited Thailand. It sounds far away, but when you're already in Taiwan (where my parents and younger sister are currently living), it's actually only a few hours by plane. We split our time between Bangkok (the capitol city), and Koh Samui (an island).

By sampling different foods as we strolled the streets, we discovered that there is a fair amount of Thai food that we like. Since we have also learned that cooking classes and food tours are a lot of fun and a good way to experience a culture (note our Rome food tour and Chicago cooking classes), we decided to do a cooking class here.

We settled on a cooking class taught by a Thai lady, Pai, in Koh Samui. In typical Faber fashion, we embraced the local culture and rode three mopeds to the class.

As we approached, Pai waved at us, the only white people in sight. After cooling down in her dining room, we started cooking. There was a long table with little stations for each of us; we all had our own cutting board, mortar and pestle, and trays of ingredients for the three recipes. We were making stir fried vegetables, pad Thai, and either green or red curry.

First we prepped all of the ingredients. She explained what each one was and how to cut it. There were some interesting ones, like tamarind, tofu, and fish sauce. We cut the carrots into little flowers, unzipped the snow peas (I failed miserably on at least five snow peas before I understood what she meant), and ground a bunch of spices together with a mortar and pestle to make the curry sauce. Pai explained to us the difference between red, green and yellow curry: red curry (the least spicy) uses a large dried red pepper, green uses small fresh red and green peppers, and yellow curry uses  a small dried red pepper as well as some curry powder. I chose red curry and I removed all of the seeds from my chili—my curry was NOT going to burn my tongue off! My red curry turned out to be the least spicy of all of ours, which I was quite content with. Dad chose to make green chili, and it was way too spicy for me!

After prepping, we went out to the porch where there was a little stove and table for each of us. We used woks, sometimes cooking one half of a recipe then shoving that part up onto the side of the wok and cooking the rest of the recipe in the bottom of the wok before mixing it all together. It was certainly efficient! One thing that surprised me about this part was that we added sugar to all of the recipes. It makes the dishes have a sweeter flavor than I am used to in cooking. I really liked this part of the Thai food!

At the end, we sat down with our meal and ate up. I liked everything, but I think my favorite was the stir fried vegetables—the sauce was so good! Everyone had a different favorite, though. Although I wanted to, there was no way I could finish all of my food (except the vegetables, obvi).

As we left Pai gave us each a recipe book, and despite some of the strange ingredients, hopefully I will be able to recreate these dishes at home sometime! But probably not all at once, because the whole class took about two hours...and we didn't even do the preparations ourselves for some of the food, like the chicken. My whole family enjoyed this class, and when I recreate the dishes sometime, I will post the recipes here!

Here is the link to Pai's website: http://paicookerysamui.com