Cooking Lessons

One of the brocures had an ad for a cooking class from 5-8:30PM, pick 7 of about 15 dishes, cost 1200B; be in the lobby at 5:00 for the transfer. Easy.

I'm in the lobby at 4:45, still in the lobby at 5:25. Finally some lady comes running in and asks if I'm for the cooking school. She leads me to a Toyota parked across the road, still running, with a couple of big, strong, blond, and bronzed American guys in it—the class?

We take off through traffic, winding down the beach road toward who knows where, bobbing and weaving amid scooters and pedestrians and gawkers and hawkers, all with legitimate claims to the road. She turns off at an unmarked, unlit driveway that leads to a food prep area reminiscent of a large camp kitchen: bamboo thatched roof (not so American campy) with open sides, a wooden table in front for sitting and eating, a larger table with a plastic cloth and tamarind rounds for chopping, and parallel rows of low-flame burners.

A youngish, typically poised and beautiful girl waves us to the table—indeed, the class consists of us three—where there is something of an antipasto dish: betel nut leaves with toasted coconut, dried shrimp, peanuts, wedges of fine0dice lime, ginger and shallot with peppers, and a palm sugar dipping sauce. She demonstrates how to fold the leaf and construct the wrap, then hands out a brochure that looks unlikethe one at the hotel; in fact, there are no commonalities. Perhaps most notably the name of the school. And instead of a 7-dish course, we are to pick five of six offered, at a price of 800B.

Words with the hotel? Just a few.

No papaya salad, no chicken satay, no holy basil, no massaman curry, o curry paste, no... reason to complain or cheapen the present experience because I was misled at the hotel. I will learn to make tom yam soup, pad thai noodles, cashew chicken, and green curry with sticky rice pudding and mango for dessert.

Hands washed, aprons donned, we take the tamarind round, each of which has about a 6” cleaver on it. In the middle of the table is a large reed basket with a green plastic dome over it—something like an inverted strainer, Thailand's universal substitute for a veggie crisper. Chefette—she's just too cute to be Chef—walks us around the ingredients: baby eggplant, straw mushrooms, tomatoes, limes, a kaffir lime (“We only cook with the skin of this one, the rest we use for your hair; regular limes we cook with but don't eat except in the appetizer plate”), kaffir leaves, galangal, lemongrass, Thai celery (looks more like parseley--”it's called Thai celery because it's small, like Thai people”), sweet basil, coriander, garlic chives, spring onion, garliv cloves, peppers, a carrot, sprouts, a cayenne pepper, and a cucumber.

Add proteins and starch and you have the gamut of Thai cooking.

Well, of course there's fish sauce.

Chefette passes out little spears of lemongrass, maybe as long as a finger with an extra knuckle. “You cut like angle, see?” Slice into long-knuckle length on a sharp angle—four slices of lemongrass. Next, pull the spine from a kaffir leaf; the halves go on a little plate with the lemongrass.

Watching the other guys makes me wonder how Chefette keeps her nerves in line—this program hosts up to 9 people, and there are no entry requirements. One of the guys is darn close to adding his pointer finger with the lemongrass—what would happen were he to try dismantling a chicken?

“Now you need one chili, maybe two, if you like it hot.” She's too cute and knows it. “We cook the whole chili but you must crush it first, otherwise none of the heat gets out. Why? The magic is on the inside, in the seeds. So crush it with the flat of your knife, like this” *THWACK* “and now don't touch your eye or your nose or go to the bathroom without washing your hands really, really well.

“Finally, take about three or four slices of the galangal—thin, maybe a little wider than your knife, and that's all you need for the herb part of your soup.”

Brief bit of foreshadowing, or outright chronology-busting, but to an end: “Thai cooking has five steps,” she explained. “First, you get the herbs going; second you add the protein, unless you're using shrimp or something else that cooks really quickly; third you add vegetables; fourth is the sauce; fifth is any garnish or something for making the plate beautiful.” Prep happens in the same sequence.

For veggies, Chefette quartered a medium wite onion and gave us ach a chunk with orders to quarter it and separate the segments. She halved some Roma-esque tomatoes with orders to quarter. We were to halve the straw mushrooms longitudinally, then cut the halves into thirds. We were given parsely, spring onion, and a seeded slice of lime. She passed out little mini bowls for sauce: a small tsp of sugar and a Chinese soupspoon of fish sauce. Finally, chop up some cilantro and spring onion. Done.

“Okay, cover your plates, now we'll prep the pad thai.”

A few cloves of crushed garlic--”it's Thai garlic so the skin is delicate and you can cook it;” cut a thin strip of tofu into fork-sized chunks, set between the garlic and some bean sprouts, and construct a sauce: a spoonful of fish sauce, a spoonful of oyster sauce, a small teaspoonful of sugar, a large pinch of dried shrimp, and a tablespoon of tamarind. Cover and let sit while we make soup.

Magically, three of the burners have pots on them, each with about a cup of water and a hint of chicken stock in it. Bring this to a boil, add the kaffir, galangal, and lemongrass. WHOA! It smells like hot and sour soup! Add the veggies—onion, tomato, mushroom. Little bowls of deveined shrimp magically appear—here's how they keep people from really hurting themselves. Stir in the sauce, squeeze in the lime, and she comes around with a little spoonful of Thai chili paste. Shrimp go in and burners go off; stir until shrimp turn pink, add the herb garnish, and pour into a bowl. Done.

While we put the soups on the table under plastic covers, the dirty dishes magically disappear and fresh woks appear on the burners, along with little cups of chicken.

For pad thai, get some oil going, brown the tofu, add garlic and chicken, noodles that have been soaking until they're malleable and a liberal douse of water, return to a boil, add sauce and cook off the fluidity; crack in an egg, break the yolk and give it a round-the-world spin of the wok until it cooks through, then add any fresh veggies and fold everything together. Garnish with ground peanuts and green onions.

Chefette left us to enjoy our first round of eating, which was probably smart of her but didn't help the awkward factor with us. We'll leave it there.

For the rest, we farangs were involved in none of the difficult prep: making good sticky rice, making good jasmine rice, making curry powder.

For cashew chicken, stirfry cashews until they're getting some color, add garlic, chicken, diced mushroom and onion; shock with some water and a sauce of oyster, fish, a little sugar, reduce to sticky. Done.

For the curry, chop eggplant, onion, and baby corn into water. Heat up some oil, add half a spoonful of curry paste, diced strips of chicken, the veggies (without water, which they bathe in for aesthetic purposes only) and about a cup of coconut milk; reduce.

Sticky rice pudding: heat coconut milk, cut in sticky rice, reduce while stirring, let stand. Done.

Ultimately, a fascinating evening. What could be construed as the “actual” cooking is stupid simple. Any actual art is in background steps, and I'd bet a limb that every single Thai person knows a gramma who did it better than anyone else in the world: the curry, shrimp paste, fish sauce, whatever. But what makes it, bottom line, is the ingredients.

No matter how carefully I try to replicate it when I get home, if I don't have galangal and lemongrass and veggies grown with Thai microbes and cooked with pure Thai tap water, it's just not going to taste like tom yam.

What I hope to bring home is a working knowledge of the sauces: I know I can get fish sauce, oyster sauce, palm sugar, and chili paste. If I know what to do with them, I should be able to make some good things happen, even without the stank of fermenting fish.