Thai Cooking Class

Today I returned to Bai Pai Thai Cooking School in an effort to receive my diploma. There are 7 classes and I was here for my 2nd class. Tomorrow I will take 2 classes and complete the last three hopefully next week.

One nice thing about these classes is that I meet a lot of people from a variety of locations. Today for example there was (l-r)Johnathan from Kuala Lampur Malaysia, David from Brisbane Australia, and Evan from Cork Ireland. More people joined who came from Australia, Denmark and Gabby, a young "Broadway" style performer who was from California but now lives in the Philippines.

Bai Pai is one of the best schools in Thailand. It has been featured on a few TV Food shows and I really enjoy how they manage the lessons. The teachers prepares each dish, they we have our turn at it with pre-measured ingredients.









Today's lesson started off with Yellow Curry Paste. We then proceeded to make Kra Tong Thong (Golden Cup). These are little pastry cups are then filled with stir fried veggies. This style is known as "Royal Thai" food. You don't find this on the street. I need to purchase one of the molds so I can make this at home. The cups are made from a batter of rice flour, wheat flour, corn flour, eggs, sugar, salt and palm oil. The veggies were all fresh (carrots, sweet corn, peas, onions), but you can use frozen mixed veggies as well. And we all said these little cups can be used to hold pudding or other types of deserts.












Next we made Yam Woon Sen which is a glass noodle (mung bean) salad with mushrooms, pork (chicken can be substituted) and Prawns.









This was followed by Nuea Pad Prik (Beef and Chili). Note, the Chili are not hot. They are large red and green sweet chili.









And we finished the course with Gang Ka-Ree Gai (Yellow Curry Chicken). This dish has a strong Coconut milk/cream texture. To cut that down a bit, the recipe calls for a dipping sauce which you can see sitting upper right of the main plate. It is a mixture of water, vinegar, sugar, cucumber, shallot and Jalapeno chilies. One adds the Yellow Curry Chicken over the rice then pours a small amount of the dipping sauce over it all. To date, this was the most interesting Thai taste I have ever experienced. The curry with the dipping sauce didn't at first seem appealing. But it was awesome.



This was the mildest of all the Thai dishes I've learned to prepare. Of course, one can always add the Thai Chilies later.