Cooking Thai Dishes in Bangkok

It was fun travelling the past couple of weeks and exploring new places. 

I travelled with my childhood friend recently to Bangkok, Thailand. 

We certainly enjoyed our stay in Bangkok since everyday was filled with activities such as shopping, trying new restaurants and exploring new places.

Since my friend and I like to cook, we enrolled in a half day class at Silom Thai Cooking School, a local cooking school that had been highly rated by travellers, to learn some of our favourite Thai dishes.

It is easy to reserve a slot at the cooking school since all you need to do is to go their website and register and they will send a confirmation via email complete with directions on how to go to the meeting place and cooking school.

Silom Thai Cooking School teaches authentic Thai-style cooking in a quick and easy way. Certified Thai cooking instructors facilitate the cooking sessions to a small group(maximum of 9 people per class) and each attendee gets a chance to learn to prepare their ingredients, cook and eat the dishes. The class also includes a market visit at a nearby market where attendees get to see where fresh ingredients can be bought.

Since it rained when we were on our way to the cooking school, we encountered some traffic and ended up missing the market visit. Good thing the school has prepared ready ingredients that can accommodate cooking for a group of nine people.

Our teacher was Chef Naan, who shared with us information about the essential ingredients and techniques in cooking Thai dishes.

A colourful set-up containing fresh ingredients was presented
to our group by Chef Naan 

We learned how to make Tom Yum soup(Hot and Sour Prawn Soup).

Ingredients for Tom Yum include lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, straw mushrooms,
galanggal ginger, lime juice, green onions, Bird's eye chilies and fish sauce

We cooked all the ingredients in a wok with water, added tomato slices
 fresh prawns,coconut milk, lime juice, fish sauce and Thai chili paste.

The Tom Yum soup is ready once prawns are cooked

To make the soup look nicer just garnish with some fresh
coriander on top and slices of red chili on the side.

We were also taught by our teacher to make fish cakes using minced fresh white fish and she taught us to make the sweet chili sauce too.

After tasting fish cakes that we prepared, we cooked Pad Thai, a popular fried noodle dish that my friend and I like and usually order at Thai restaurants.

Pad Thai basic ingredients include egg, raw bean sprouts, fish sauce, palm
sugar, chives or green onions, firm tofu, finely chopped pickled white
 raddish, ground red chili powder, roasted cashew nuts, tamarind paste.

The Pad Thai dish that I cooked with some fresh prawns and
served with a lime wedge and some grounded cashew nuts,
 dried chili powder, sugar and raw bean sprouts on the side.

The dishes we prepared are really yummy and the taste is really close to the taste of the dishes that we have tasted at some of the good Thai restaurants that we have been to.

Our teacher also taught us to make fresh red curry paste which is a key ingredient used for Red Curry dishes.

The red curry paste is made by mixing chopped dried red spur chilies, 
bird's eye chilies, glangal ginger, kaffir lime rind, garlic, shallots,
 coriander root, lemon grass, cumin seeds, roasted coriander seeds
 and roasted black peppercorns.

All of us had a chance to chop the red chilies finely and pound it using a huge brick and mortar.

Pounding the ingredients for Red Curry paste using a mortar and
pestle is good since the flavours are released well and the granite
stone also keeps the curry paste cool.

Freshly made Red Curry paste

Once our red curry paste was ready, we prepared our other ingredients needed to cook the dish.

Ingredients for Red curry include kaffir lime leaves, cut eggplants,
sweet basil and shredded ginger

Our teacher poured the fresh coconut milk in our woks as we were cooking our Red Curry Chicken dish in our cooking stations.

Red Curry with Chicken served with white rice

For dessert, our teacher taught us how to make mango with sticky rice. 

Our teacher told us that sticky rice is best cooked in a
traditional steamer.

Mango with sticky rice

We really had fun learning to cook Thai dishes and we found it easy to make the dishes too since our teacher was knowledgeable and demonstrated  well to us the simple cooking techniques on preparing Thai dishes. Plus, the cooking class was really a good deal since the fee is affordable at only THB1,000 per person.

It is best to eat light during breakfast before you attend the morning cooking class since the five-course meal that you will learn to cook and eat is quite heavy for lunch. 

To know more about Silom Thai Cooking School, chekout their website: Silom Thai Cooking School.