“Sit on the rabbit! She very old, but she strong!”
Chef Nirachara “Noi” Wongturan’s grin is wide as I straddle a carved wooden rabbit with a metal scraping tool drilled into its jaws. I use the old-school tool to scrape the tender flesh out of a freshly cracked coconut.
Chef Noi — as everyone calls her — laughs and holds up a modern, hand-held gadget that will do the trick.
I’m at Baipai Thai Cooking School, learning to make both coconut milk and coconut cream and learning how they’re used in Thai dishes.
An hour earlier I was waiting in the lobby of my downtown Bangkok hotel, where a van came around like a school bus to gather me and my fellow students for a morning of culinary instruction. We’re an international group: a couple from Brazil, a Chinese woman, a fellow from Taiwan, a retired couple from the East Coast and me. We’ve come together in a small, open-air pavilion-style building deep in a residential neighborhood of Thailand’s bustling capital city.
Ever since I took my first cooking class abroad, I find myself seeking out markets back home — markets I hadn’t even known were there, asking for ingredients I never knew existed. Travel can be life-changing, and it should be. What better place to start than in the kitchen? For me, the best souvenir is a good recipe. Nothing will take me back to Thailand like a well-made curry.
Classes at Baipai are capped at a maximum of 12 students. The English-speaking instructors are graduates of Thai culinary schools and have international work experience. Chef Noi, our playful instructor for the day, spent several years working at restaurants in Switzerland.
While some cooking schools include a trip to an open market in search of ingredients, Baipai does things a little differently. The school’s garden and manicured grounds include many of the items we’ll be using: a kaffir lime tree, pandan leaves, holy basil and chili plants. Our instructor guides us through this al fresco pantry, talking about each ingredient’s place in the Thai kitchen, how it is picked, when it is ready and what to look for when selecting it.
Chef Noi gives a mini-lecture on fish sauce, that pungent and somewhat intimidating but critically important ingredient in Thai food. She recommends brands and shows us how to tell when the bottle is past its prime. These garden lectures would be difficult in a crowded market. Instead, we spend more time learning and asking questions rather than traveling to and from some off-site location. (Half-day classes cost about $60, depending on exchange rates; www.baipai.com.)
Once we’ve gotten to know our ingredients, we head for the test kitchen to individually prepare our dishes. Chef Noi doesn’t merely walk us through a recipe; she peppers us with valuable preparation tips, such as how to pound curry paste ingredients with a mortar and pestle. (Use a guiding hand to also block the space around the pestle, and do not lean in to observe too closely. It’s better to hear about getting a bit of chili juice in your eye than to learn from experience.) She also suggests substitutions. For the chicken in pandan leaves recipe, thigh meat is preferable to breast meat. Shrimp works as a substitute, while pork and beef do not. If leaves from tropical pandan plants aren’t readily available, use corn husks instead.
The students are arranged around the preparation area facing Chef Noi. She points up and says, “Look at TV show!” before stirring her ingredients. An angled mirror above gives us a bird’s-eye view into the wok.
It’s important to have a patient teacher like Chef Noi. I’ve felt left behind in other cooking lessons — even when the group is small. You miss a step or your food burns while you’re waiting for guidance from the instructor. But Chef Noi has a sharp eye. She checks on us even as she prepares her own ingredients, and a couple of assistants hover about, noticing when one of us gets hung up or frowns at our mortar and pestle as if they weren’t cooperating.
We learn to make curry paste from scratch. We prepare sticky rice and a fresh green papaya salad. And we marinate and carefully fold chicken into long, green pandan leaves before taking them to our woks full of hot oil.
“Put and run,” our chef warns. We hop back when the oil spatters as the food sinks in its toasty bath.
Staff whisk away dirty dishes — another upside to cooking classes. They bring us our ingredients. We work through several recipe cards inside a folder that opens like a desk calendar to form an easel. No need to take notes; the cards are ours to keep.
As we finish plating the food, the aprons start coming off as we prepare to dig into our handiwork. Chef Noi stops us before we get too far.
“Don’t forget garnish,” she says, arranging a sprig of Thai basil atop a bowl of curry. “See? Like 5-star hotel. 250 baht with garnish. Without garnish? Only 50 baht.”
And knowing how to make it at home? That, as they say, is priceless.
Kevin Revolinski is a freelance reporter.
