I’m one of those people who can take off and go on an impromptu trip. Like I don’t need to plan months in advance. Make that days for me. And so I took myself off to Bangkok at the last week of October, prompted by a colleague asking if I would be interested in going to Bangkok with her for the weekend. I hadn’t been back to Bangkok for 29 years (!!!) and was keen to see the city again so off I went!
The trip was what my colleague called a “taitai trip” as all we did was shop, eat and go for massages. One of the places we went to was the Silom Thai Cooking School and we had an enjoyable time learning how to cook Thai food.
We opted for the morning class which saw us first making a short trip to the local wet market to get our ingredients for the day. Then we took a tuktuk back to the school where our aprons lay waiting for us.
The small cooking studio was decorated with colourful vintage trinkets and looked really charming.
Our first task was to sit down on the floor and squeeze the grated coconut we brought back from the market to obtain fresh coconut milk that we would use for the soup and curry.
We then sat around this beautiful platter of vegetables and herbs that we had brought back from the market and listened to our teacher telling us about the dishes we were going to cook. The staff at the school had arranged our ingredients into this lovely display of Thai produce. I found that the staff at Silom Cooking School paid attention to aesthetic details – brownie points for that!
The first dish we were going to prepare was Tom Yum Goong, the famous spicy and sour Thai soup. We had to chop up our ingredients such as Kaffir lime leaf, tomato, mushroom, lemon grass, fresh chilli, galangal (a type of ginger), and spring onion.
How it works is that you cook your own individual portion of the dish. The school’s staff would have already measured the portions beforehand. Cooking your own portion also means you can adjust the spice level according to your liking. The photo above shows the work-in-progress stages of my Tom Yum Goong.
The finished product – it was yummy with just the right amount of taramind water, lime juice, chilli and herbs.
Ingredients for Pad Thai – chives, bean sprouts, tofu, palm sugar, chilli flakes, garlic, egg, peanuts, fish sauce, tamarind and palm sugar.
After cooking one dish we would sit down to eat it immediately. After we have finished eating we would then proceed to make the next dish. I was already full after having the Tom Yum Goong and Pad Thai. And there were still three more dishes to go!
Here our teacher explains how to make Thai Papaya Salad.
A delicious mix of shredded papaya, carrot (mainly added for colour), lime juice, long beans, palm sugar, fish sauce and tamarind.
The next dish was the Chicken Massuman Curry. Water and coconut cream were added to this mix of curry paste (which we made and pounded from scratch), diced chicken, chopped potato and tomato.
The finished dish
Finally, mango sticky pudding for dessert. The glutinous rice was steamed and then mixed with sugar and freshly squeezed coconut milk.
A session at Silom Thai Cooking School is definitely an activity I would recommend in Bangkok. Everything was well organized and the staff were professional and pleasant. The session costs THB 1,000 per person.
