Asia Scenic Thai Cooking School - Chiang Mai

Learning to cook authentic Thai food was one of the things (ok, honestly -- probably the only thing) that I had planned for our trip to Thailand. I had seen a cooking competition on the Food Network a few years ago, where contestants travelled to Chiang Mai to compete, and I knew that I wanted to do the cooking classes in Chiang Mai. Happily, Molly was keen to do a cooking class as well.

open air kitchen ... the "in town" location of Asia Scenic, Chiang Mai

There is no shortage of schools that offer cooking classes and we did extensive "beer work" to decide on one. There was one place almost directly across the street from our guest house, but ultimately we opted for the "Asia Scenic Thai Cooking School" for two reasons: they take you to a local market to teach you about some staples of Thai cooking and they hold classes at their 'farm' about an hour's drive out in the countryside outside of Chiang Mai. We thought the farm was a good place for us (ahahaha!) and we liked the idea that they are into organic, sustainable and renewable farming. We opted for the full day lesson, obviously -- more food, more cooking and most importantly more eating!!!

After being picked up at our hotel, we met our group of ten amateur cooks for the day, and we made our selection of dishes. Of course, since Molly and I had already diligently done our beer work, we were ready to go and knew exactly what dishes we wanted to prepare -- the others in the group -- not so much! There are five categories and at least three options in each category that each student can choose from. The categories are: (a) stir fry dish; (b) appetizer; (c) soup; (d) curry paste and coinciding curry dish; and (e) dessert. Every member of the class cooks their choices -- the whole group does not have to cook the same thing so that offers couples/friends the chance to learn and taste more than one dish in each category.

Our guide and teacher Sue showing us some different chilies

We headed off to the market where Sue, our guide, chief cook, teacher and overall leader for the day showed us a variety of different herbs, spices, chilies and rices. She explained that the key to Thai cooking is to balance sweet, salty and sour flavours. Sweetness is generally achieved by using palm sugar or cane sugar, salty flavour with the use of either fish sauce or soy sauce and sour with lime. These are all key ingredients in Thai cooking and feature in many Thai dishes.

fruits and veggies

spices, spices ...

and more spices ...

and rices

We left the market in our group van and arrived at the farm about an hour later. We were incredibly surprised and pleased at the beautiful kitchen and communal dining space that was awaiting us. This location easily rivals The Urban Element cooking school here in Ottawa, except there are no walls!

It was a little before 11am and it was already a scorcher of a day. First order of business at the farm is a tour where Sue shows us fresh ingredients that are grown right there (along with challenges for us students to try and guess what the growing herbs and fruits are). Before heading out we donned our Asian hats to deal with the hot sun beating down on us.

Along the tour ... can you figure everything out?

papaya

grapefruit ... but quite different than we are used to

old school tuk-tuk


flowers ...








and the baby called "Cookery" ... daughter of one of the kitchen staff

galangal leaves ... (I think!) but it is the root that you cook with

Sue, knee-deep in various basil plants

After the tour we make our way to the dining room where the staff had prepared a traditional Thai "Welcome Plate" for us to start off our day. You use the leaf as a cone and take piece of each ingredient and then drizzle the sweet chili sauce over top.

from bottom left (counter-clockwise): betel leaf, peanuts, toasted coconut,

ginger, shallot, green chilies and sliced lime

"Chok Dee" which means Good Luck and is

used for toasts and "cheers"

Then we gathered with the group that was cooking on the other side of the kitchen for a group lesson on cooking sticky rice.

group two's instructor showing us how to prepare sticky rice

And now it's time to get our hands dirty and get down to cooking. We all get an apron and hand towel and we head over to the kitchen to start preparing our stir fry dish. The kitchen is extremely well organized with the basic prep work having been completed by the kitchen staff beforehand, however, chopping some vegetables, incorporating ingredients and actually cooking are all hands on, so that you will be able to make the dish on your own at home.

chopping on my teak tree chopping block

my prepped ingredients:  basil leaves, carrots, baby corns

onions, garlic and fresh chilies

chopped carrot, kale and garlic for Molly's pad see uw

Sue proceeded to give us a lesson on spiciness for the day: baby sexy to refer to only a little bit of spiciness, medium-sexy for, well, medium spicy and maximum-sexy for as spicy as you can take it. I myself pretty much stuck with high medium to maximum sexy for the day and I think Molly was at about the same level of sexiness as me too!

a lesson on sexy cooking!

Earlier in the day Sue explained to us that Pad Thai (one of the options for the stir fry) is not, in fact, a traditional Thai dish but was created from Chinese influence on Thai cuisine and culture. So, not surprisingly, no one in our group chose to make the Pad Thai as their stir fry dish. I picked the hot basil stir fry and Molly chose the pad see uw. As we dropped the chicken into the hot oil in our woks, the young woman who was at the cooking station beside me accidentally splashed a bit of hot oil on my foot. She was immensely sorry and she felt terrible but it gave me some material to tease her about for the rest of the day. By her own admission, she is a terrible cook and I warned all the other students to stand back when she was using a knife or the wok. It was a fun group and we all had a lot of laughs during the day so she took my teasing with a smile and full agreement.

Now for the best part, having finished cooking our stir frys we sat down to eat them.

chicken and hot basil stir fry - I could use a little work on

my plating techniques I think!

pad see uw - sprinkled with dry chilies on top

After eating it was back to the kitchen for the next course: the appetizer. I chose (... wait for it ...) the papaya salad!!!! Yay!!! After a year of anxiously waiting, I'm finally going to learn how to make this beautiful dish.

Here is where I fell in love with the massive wooden mortar and pestle and decided that I must have one of my own. The trick to incorporating the dressing into the salad is a sort of mixing/pounding variation where you use a large spoon and the pestle in combination to infuse the dressing into the veggies. Molly's choice for appetizer was the glass noodle salad.

appetizer preparation and instructions


Kim, a fellow student, deep frying her appetizer:  spring rolls 

After everyone prepared their appetizers, we all sat down again and ate what we made. My salad was awesome; it was definitely maximum sexy, fresh and crisp. Molly and I shared each of our dishes so we got to taste double the amount of food. In fact, by the end of the day most everyone was sharing with everyone else in the group so that we had an opportunity to taste pretty much everything that was cooked by one of our group.

papaya salad-gasm!!!

making Molly wait to eat her glass noodle salad so I can take pictures!

and the finished spring rolls - yummy deelish!

Although it was a hot day, and it was hot while we were cooking, the dining table is set up with misting fans directed towards it so we were able to cool off a little in between courses. We also went through many pitchers of water as well! Seems a lot of students were cooking maximum-sexy!

ingredients to make curry paste:  front massaman curry,

left side:  green curry and back:  red curry

Next up, we prepared our chili paste for our chosen curries. Again the kitchen staff had prepped the ingredients we needed for the chili paste but we had to pound it out. Here we used the granite mortar and pestle because you really have to work hard to muddle those chilies down into a paste.  Both the red, massman and panang curries use dried chilies; the green curry uses fresh chilies.

I chose the green curry and I was actually the only student making that one (one other woman had initially chose it but when Sue told us it was the spiciest curry she changed her mind and went with the panang curry -- a variation on red curry which incorporates peanuts and is much milder than the green or red curry).

getting a helping hand from Chip -- it's hard work making curry paste!

Only one fellow in our group picked the massman curry which has more of an Indian influence and it is the only curry where you toast the spices (i.e. star anise, coriander seeds, fennel) first. This fellow mentioned to Sue that he wanted his curry MAXIMUM-sexy to which Sue responded "Maximum-sexy today; NOT sexy in the toilet tomorrow!" Ahahahahaha!

finished curry paste

(clockwise from right):  green, massaman, panang and red

At this point, before doing any more cooking we finished the preparation for our remaining three courses. We chopped all the vegetables for our respective curries and for our soups.  Then we moved on to instructions and prep work for desserts.  For dessert, I picked the deep fried bananas. Those of us doing this dish started by making the batter and cutting up the bananas.

getting our instructions

mixing batter

Then we went off to the boiling oil to deep fry them. I was the first to deep fry and the oil was a tad on the hot side.

trying to not get a hot oil burn

Once we all fried our bananas, we set them aside and we had a group lesson on the mango sticky rice - the dessert that Molly chose. While Sue instructed, Molly and the other students who picked this dish did the cooking, as the rest of us watched (and some of us learned!).

barefoot cooking -- likely frowned upon at The Urban Element! LOL!

Desserts were completed and set aside, at which time we moved back to our cooking stations to cook the curry. Once that was complete, we set it aside on our cooking station and moved on to the soup.

green curry

I chose the tom sab soup and Molly went with the tom yum soup. It is pretty amazing that starting with a pot of nothing but water within a very short cooking time you can have a delicious, flavourful, spicy bowl of steaming soup. I love cooking soups at home but I'm used to having them simmer on the stove for hours to impart the depth of flavour that we achieved in the cooking class in merely minutes. That is a testament to the rich flavours that these fresh Thai ingredients provide.

taste-testing

Now that all of our dishes were cooked, it was time to return to the communal table and chow down! Many plates were passed around the table, and especially since there was only one green curry and one massaman curry these were shared with pretty much anyone who wanted a taste.

All in all, my absolute favourite dish of the day was my tom sab soup. Quite a surprise for me as it was something I had never had before and it was my most maximum-sexy dish of the day (so maximum-sexy that I could barely eat it and yet I could not stop eating it!!!! Quite the conundrum.)

As a lover of spicy food, with each dish I made being spicy -- it certainly creeps up on you and builds throughout every course. By the end, I had to continually take a bite of deep fried banana to cool my mouth off so that I could keep on eating my soup and green curry.


I thought my deep fried bananas were even better than the ones I had from the street vendor in Bangkok (probably slightly sweeter which might have been the tipping point).

 Molly's kao soi curry - nice crunch with the chow mein noodles on top








  and tom yum soup

I can't tell you how much fun this course was. And on top of learning about some new ingredients to help me improve my Thai cooking knowledge and skills, we ate like royalty - all day! The ingredients at Asia Scenic are as fresh and local as you can get. Sue, our instructor, was absolutely top-notch; she was patient and extremely knowledgeable as well as funny and friendly. The location, the staff, the kitchen and the facilities could not have been better. This was an excellent experience and one of the highlights for me, in Thailand. After looking forward to taking cooking classes for so long, not only was I not disappointed, the entire day far exceeded my expectations in every way. And ... all this for the unbelievable, discounted price of $28 CND. Outrageous!

After all the instructions and cooking, and with our bellies full we had about an hour to rest and relax and enjoy the beautiful scenery of the farm. We were each given our own cookbooks which include all the recipes that Asia Scenic teaches (not just the ones our group cooked that day). Sue was available to answer any questions if there was something that we hadn't touched upon in the classes. We watched the ducks swimming in the pond and chatted with our fellow cooking companions while chilling out and digesting our incredible meal.