Since we first planned our trip, a cooking course in Chiang Mai was always going to be a highlight. We both love cooking, and thought we had a reasonable grasp of Thai cuisine, that was until we sampled the real thing. Our anglicised green curries, while very tasty in their own right, were completely inauthentic, and the kind of stir-fried noodle dishes we’d serve up as students barely shared a single ingredient with the real Thai version. Cookery schools in Chiang Mai are ubiquitous, but we wanted to find the absolute best. We had been recommended a particular cooking course by a fellow traveller: the teacher, Yui, had apparently taught Gordon Ramsey how to cook Thai!
Pad Thai
The course began with the modern Thai street food classic, Pad Thai. It was the Clare’s favourite Thai dish, and was our first authentic street food experience on the night we arrived in Bangkok. The ingredients are relatively simple, and the cooking procedure incredibly quick and easy. The key to a successful Pad Thai, like every dish in Thai cooking, lies in the balance of the four essential tastes. A sauce made of palm sugar, tamarind pulp and fish sauce/light soy sauce fulfilled the sweet, sharp and salty elements respectively, and a garnish of chilli added a kick. We mixed our sauce beforehand to Yui’s measurements, although she admitted that the quantities are never the same and the only way to be sure is to taste. When the right balance is struck, there is a kind of taste explosion, with all the elements bouncing off each other on the tongue. The Pad Thai sauce becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. Yui confessed to happily eating the sauce with anything, a bit like a Thai ketchup, and recommended making a big batch and freezing in ice cube trays for pad thai on demand.
The other ingredients were finely diced fried tofu, preserved turnip, a garnish of Chinese chives, which look just like spring onion but have a distinctly different flavour, and peanuts. Aside from the balance of the sauce, the other key to a successful stir fry dish is to appropriately manage the heat of your wok and full preparation of all ingredients is essential, as the cooking process is fast and intense. The heat necessary to cook different ingredients is controlled not by adjusting the flame, but by moving ingredients to different parts of the pan (Noodles once cooked were pushed up the side to steam, whilst an egg was fried in the intensely hot oil centre) and adding more ingredients, the thinness of the steel means that its heat is very quickly reduced by the addition of a few ingredients or a splash of water. We devoured our plate of noodles, before moving onto another classic, Thai curry.
Green/Red Curry
I opted for green and Clare chose red curry, the difference being only the type of chilli used in the paste. This was probably the dish I had been most eagerly anticipating, having tried an amazing curry at a restaurant in Bangkok, declared by The Observer as the best place in the world to eat it. We used a paste of chilli, shallot, garlic, lemongrass, shrimp paste, coriander seed and cumin seed. To my initial surprise Yui confessed that she rarely made her own paste, but when there’s a woman at your local market who’s been making and selling fresh curry pastes for years it soon became clear why. The paste was very similar to the kind we used at home, perhaps a little more pungent, but this is where the similarities ended.
We started, not with frying the paste in oil, but by heating a cup of coconut cream. In Thailand, they have both coconut cream and coconut milk, the richer, fattier cream comes from the first pressing of the coconut flesh, and the milk the second. The cream was heated for around five minutes until it began to separate. The aim was to boil off the water content, releasing the coconut oils, in which we could fry the paste. The addition of kaffir lime leaves sent some wonderful aromas through the kitchen. Pea aubergines were next. Around the size of a large pea, they add texture and a subtle bitter flavour.
Then the chicken was thrown in along with Thai aubergines. Another useful lesson we learnt was in the fool proof use of chicken thigh as opposed to breast. The thigh, being made of many muscles, can be cooked for much longer without drying out unlike chicken breast. We simmered the curry until the chicken and aubergine were cooked through. The final ingredient, added right at the end, was the amazing Thai basil. Whilst similar in appearance to European basil, the flavour is very different, almost aniseed-like. It adds a wonderfully exotic flavour and aroma that we’d barely encountered before. We garnished our curries with fresh sliced red chilli.
Tom Yum Soup
Our notions of Thai cookery continued to be shattered with the Tom Yum soup. We did not use a chilli-rich oily paste, but made the stripped back purist version, much harder to perfect. A simple broth of smashed shallot, lemongrass, galangal, and prawn heads was simmered for around ten minutes. I remember thinking the soup was tasting quite bland, that was until the addition of tamarind and fish sauce. The umami-rich and salty Nam Pla, acted as an amplifier, boosting the flavours of the aromatic ingredients. The tamarind provided an acidic edge to cut through the saltiness. Again balance here was absolutely essential. The joy in a dish like Tom Yum is in the harmonious party of saltiness, sweetness, sharpness, with the background heat of chilli.
Market Visit
A market visit in the middle of the day provided a welcome relief for our appetites from the onslaught of dishes. The array of produce was quite amazing. More than seven different types of aubergine alone. As well as the Thai equivalent of a ready meal – A collection of the essential ingredients in the correct quantities for a quick Tom Yum soup, tethered together like a bouquet-garni.
Other Dishes
We returned to the kitchen, our appetites rejuvenated, and began with the afternoon dishes. We cooked a delicious and simple stir fry dish of chicken with cashew nuts, fried spring rolls, and possibly Asia’s only good dessert, mango sticky rice. We had found that generally Asian deserts tended to be very sweet, odd in texture (think jelly, and cooked beans), and altogether random in content (shaved ice, green noodles, steamed pumpkin…). However, the simple combination of slightly sweet, just a little salty, sticky rice topped with coconut cream, and the succulent Thai mangos was hard to resist.
Wanderlust to Wonderment 