Day two on the beautiful island of Koh Lanta started off soaking up the sun, swimming in the warm water, and reading.
If you read my first post, I explained how Time for Lime is also a Thai cooking school. Well watch out Chef Mark, your little sister knows authentic Thai!
The class started with a stop at the bar for a cocktail, then we headed to the 2nd level for an overview of Thai cooking with Junie. The lesson started with the 3 important S’s needed for proper Thai cooking: sweet, salty, sour. And of course there’s the 4th S which is for spicy (and Thai’s enjoy their spicy). To experience the S’s we had a snack. We folded a wild pepper leaf into a cone and filled it with peanuts, dried baby prawn, toasted coconut, ginger, onion, lime, chili, and topped it with a drizzle of honey. Per Junie’s instructions, I closed my eyes, put the whole thing in my mouth and allowed myself to experience the taste. It was delicious!
And it really emphasized the importance in the balance of the 3 S’s in Thai cooking. Next up was the lesson on eat me/don’t eat me. To put it simply, there are some ingredients that are prepared certain ways to help the eater identify if it’s in the dish to be eaten or just for flavor. The don’t eat me wasn’t that it was an inedible ingredient, such as a bay leaf, it just meant that it was there to flavor the dish and if you did eat it the ingredient would overpower the other flavors in your mouth. The ingredients are also prepared in ways to help them get the most flavor into the dish as needed.
Once we had the sit down part of the lesson under our belts, it was time for another stop at the bar before heading to our working stations. Each chef is provided a cutting board, “kill knife”, tasting spoon, and then the necessary pots and pans for each dish (supplied by the staff as we went).
We cooked a total of 4 dishes, and ate them two at a time. First up was lab (chicken and herb salad) and red curry with prawn. The instructor started by showing us how to cut each ingredient then we followed. They then showed us the cooking process for each dish (which was extremely fast), allowed us to taste, and then we went to work at our own station. Once completed, we plated our two dishes and then went upstairs to enjoy our feast. I think the consensus was that most people had a heavy hand when it came to the spicy aspect and I decided that while I enjoyed the amount of spice I put in, I’d go a little lighter on my next round.
Prepping the ingredients for laab:
Our wonderful teacher, Mai, showing off her beautiful plating skills:
Laura's attempt to be creative with plating, right to left is laab, red curry with shrimp, and white rice:
Can you see the fish eye made out of a chili?
Our next set was fried rice (or fly lice as Junie called it) and green curry with chicken. Again we watched how to chop the ingredients, how to cook the dish, and then went to work ourselves. What was special this time is that we made our own green curry paste. When the paste was complete, we got to smell the difference between our fresh paste and store bought and oh my word what a difference. That green curry was AMAZING and I cannot wait to make it at home!
Prepping the ingredients for green curry and fly lice:
Finished product:
Lucky for us they provided dessert to enjoy after our final meal. It was fresh bananas in coconut milk with sugar and a pinch of salt, yum! Also a perfect dish to cool down after the spicy eats.
The entire cooking class lasted just over 5 hours. It may seem like a lot but when you’re having fun, drinking cocktails, making and eating delicious food, time sure flies by! Every dish was simply delicious and nothing seemed so outrageous that we could never repeat it on our own at home. The staff was incredibly helpful, hilarious, and they clean up for you in between the courses, so nice! I left with an apron, a packet of all the recipes we cooked including a grocery list of what you need to make each, and a desire to get back home and start recreating thesedelicious meals!
If you’re on Koh Lanta, do yourself the favor and stop by for a cooking class. It doesn’t interfere with your daytime sunshine and it ends with plenty of time to go out for more drinks. Plus you get to eat amazing food that you prepared yourself! (And you won’t leave hungry).
Also good to note, they accommodate vegetarians, food allergies (note- nuts were only used in the beginning snack), and they even allow lazy partners for those who just want to eat and make their friend cook for them. And if you’d really like to keep practicing your Thai cooking skills, the menu changes each day of the week so you can learn a whole new set of dishes if you come back a 2nd time.
Thank you for the lesson and my older brother (Chef Mark) best be ready to learn some new tricks when I get home!
No comments:
Post a Comment