Chilli Academy Cooking school

When you look up cooking schools in Thailand, it’s an overwhelming experience. Hundreds of cooking schools exist in each city. If you use a rating site like tripadvisor, there will be ten or twenty that have 4.5 or 5 stars. So I needed to come up with a filtering system to reduce this to a manageable number to select the one or two (in the case of Chiang Mai) that we’d visit.

Variety was my primary criteria and I see that the vast majority of Thai cooking classes offer Pad Thai and coconut sticky rice with mangos. Michelle already cooks a good pad thai, so I went looking for a much wider variety of meals to select from.

Yesterday’s cooking class, from Pantawan, had a quite varied menu, but it was a set menu for each day. So once I knew the days we had available, we selected the day that looked the most appealing.

Today’s cooking school was unique in that they basically said “pick anything from our cookbook” so that was very appealing. I still was left wondering if we’d all still be cooking the same meal like we’ve done at every other place. The other unique thing for today was that it was an all-day affair, advertising from 9am-3pm class.

The Chili cooking academy is located at Eagle House, a local guest house which I’d located on the map and only looks a few blocks away, but we’d never seen it while walking around. They picked us up and we started at 9am, oogling through their cookbook, and had to select FIVE courses for EACH of us. Not five that we’d all have to agree on – five separate dishes for each participant. After selecting my 5, I asked why he didn’t offer Pad Kee Mao, and he said “you want it, you can have it, just remove one of your other ones” – I selected one that Michelle had also picked, stir fried morning glory. I was pretty psyched because I had yet to find a cooking class that had that as a menu item.

So, here was the list:

Michelle:
Spicy glass noodle salad
Stir fried spicy pork
Morning Glory
Golden Parcels
Banana’s in coconut milk

Jackson:
Stir fried chicken & cashew
Fried Rice
Steamed fish with lemon
Golden Parcels
Spring Rolls

Thurman
Pad Kee Mao
Papaya Salad
Mangoes with sticky rice
Chiang Mai Curry & Paste with Chicken
Chiang Mai Curry Noodle

We had one other person with us in the class who was from Germany, so pretty small class. It was a nice area with many tables and about 8 cooking stations which were comprised of a gas burner & small table for ingredients.

Our chef, Mr Visutt (we called him Sutt, or phonetically “soot”), went through all our dishes, and figured out what he already had in the way of ingredients, created a shopping list & we were off to the local market which was only 150 meters away. I should mention that we passed by an ancient 500+ year old pagoda and an old gate on this short trip.

The market was so full of vegetables and many other cooking classes were there at the same time. You can see how popular Chiang Mai is for cooking classes just by being at the market at 10am in the morning!

Nothing really new as far as ingredients, but Michelle and I really want to grow both Thai basil + Holy basil in our garden this year as they really are two very unique flavors /smells. Not all basil is the same! We had a unique experience as we approached the fish dealer and she proceeded to select a live fish from a tub at her feet, whacked it, de-scaled it, cleaned it & prepped it for cooking by giving it a few nice diagonal slices down each side. As this was Jackson’s dish, it was interesting to see his reaction as his meal was selected, killed & cleaned for him in about 3 minutes. I hadn’t brought my camera as we’d been to so many markets, sorry I missed that one! Here is the finished product:

We returned and gathered at a table where we proceed to chop, pound, slice, and group all the vegetables and meats. We also started a dessert that was going to take literally all day – the sticky rice. We’d be revisiting it throughout the day.

The coolest thing we did was to make coconut cream and coconut milk from fresh coconut. Just add water and squeeze for the cream, then repeat it for the milk. It’s nice to know how to make it from scratch and you save the left-over coconut for dessert later on!

Michelle’s Glass Noodles:

Thurman’s Pad Kee Mao:

Jackson’s Cashew Chicken:

We would each cook a meal and then sit down at this table & enjoy it. We shared our meals so everyone could sample – I think between the 4 of us, we managed to hit at least half the recipes in the cookbook.

After the first few meals, we took an hour break, just lounging around, reading or talking. I think I might have closed my eyes for 30 minutes or so it was so peaceful.

Thurman & Papaya Salad:

Then we did the desserts, salads, spring rolls + golden parcels which were a minced chicken in a wonton wrapper and deep fried. The sticky rice followed with the fried coconut, fresh mango + pineapple and the bananas in coconut milk. Michelle with Morning Glory: