Last Day in Bangkok....

...and we weren't about to let it go to waste. The highlight of the Bangkok trip had to be Sunday morning at the Baipai Cooking School. Thanks to Wikitravel I found the Baipai and we scheduled to join their Sunday morning class, which included a set menu of 4 traditional Thai dishes. The school was reviewed to be very fun and friendly, and was not as uppity and expensive as the traditional schools. They picked us up at 9:00am from the OBI (where we had breakfast and a good chat with Joey, the proprieters son who happened to study at Hopkins), and along the way we picked up a few classmates - a middle aged couple from Singapore and two guys visiting from Germany.

The Baipai is set in a nice residential area of Bangkok in an open-air 2 story house. The ground floor contains a shop and eating area, while the upper floor is where the classes take place. The class size it typically 8 people so there is space for each student to have his own cooking area. There's also a demonstration area where the teacher first explains and demonstrates the dish. Their teaching style works very well, there's a traditional Thai person who does the cooking while another person is there for explanation and answering questions. And just like Emeril, there's even an overhead mirror above the teacher's area to get a great birds-eye view of what's going on. I have tons of pictures from the cooking school and the rest of the Bangkok trip on my SmugMug site.

Our menu consisted of:

• Lemongrass Tea (instructor made it)
• Golden Treasures
• Hot and Sour Soup
• Panang Chicken Curry
• Pork Fried Rice

I have the Thai names of the dishes in my take-home cookbook, which is with Nima in Singapore at the moment.

We got started with some basics, like cutting and carving with a knife. Our assignment was to carve a half lime into a flower-like decoration to be served with one of our dishes - no problem. We then moved on to the Golden Treasures, which is basically minced pork and some flavors like spring onions, fish sauce, and garlic, mixed together, wrapped in spring roll wrappers, and deep fried. The end product looks like little money bags - hence the name golden treasures. I don't use pork much and I don't deep fry much, so this particular appetizer was a new type of dish for me. The instructor was quite helpful here with letting us know what to buy at the grocery stores back home and what substitutions can be made (basically any meat or tofu can be substituted for this). Before long, my first Thai cooking school dish was complete.

Next up was the Tom Yam Goong - Hot and Sour Shrimp soup, a Thai favorite. Again, I don't do many soups so this was fairly new to me. I learned a couple things on this dish, like you don't have to pre-cook shrimp when tossing them in the soup, and that with lemongrass stalks you must crack the stalk first to get the flavor out. We also used a new ingredient - galang root - which is basically a very mild ginger-type root. I know I've tasted it before but never knew what it was until now.

After eating soup and chatting it up with the rest of the class (the two guys from Germany were a trip, one of them was actually American living in Germany, and both were quite fruity. They certainly made for good chatter while eating our delights. Guys at cooking school are....oh wait, nevermind.)

Next up was the Panang Chicken, something I was looking forward to since its a favorite dish of mine. Its actually surprisingly easy, basic ingredients are chicken, coconut milk, and red curry paste. The trick for this dish is to heat up the coconut milk in the wok but not too hot, just before boiling, and then add the curry flavoring and mix it up, while reducing the heat. I completely botched things because I let it get too hot, and when that happens the coconut oil separates from the milk and you get this pathetic looking mess of a curry. Still, I salvaged the dish and it did taste pretty good. Nima, on the other hand, made an absoutely perfect dish and I couldn't help but eat half of hers. She was even sweet enough to tell me mine was good :)

Last on the menu was the pork fried rice, which not surprisingly was pretty easy. Though here we used some more ingredients I normally don't use, and we had practice chopping and slicing. Two very important tricks I learned here about fried rice: (1) you want to chill your cooked rice in the fridge rather than use hot rice when you throw it into the wok. Chilled rice doesn't turn to mush. And (2), When frying an egg in the wok, push all the rice and veggies to one side, make room for the egg directly on the pan, fry it, push the rice on top, and flip everything. Not sure if it makes sense here, but it worked well when cooking.

We finished up around 1:00 with full stomachs and some newly acquired culinary skills. Our time was running out in BKK, so we stopped by MBK one last time to pick up some cheap DVDs, and then headed back to OBI to check out before making our way to the airport. All in all it was a wonderful long weekend in Bangkok and I highly recommend anyone considering visitng.