Thai Farm Cooking School was one of our favorite experiences while visiting Chiang Mai and a definite must do if you are visiting Thailand for the first time. Scott was able to fly into Thailand in Business class for FREE, see how here. Scott and I both LOVE Thai food but never fully understood all the unique ingredients that give Thai food SO much flavor until this Thai cooking class. We cooked all of our favorite dishes including Pad Thai, Tom Yum soup, sticky rice and much more. See my post on all my favorite dishes in Thailand coming soon. Now where the heck do we find fish sauce, galangal, Thai basil, kaffir lime, and tamarind in Dallas, Texas?! We will definitely be on a search so we can cook some of this delicious food when we get back. Read on to learn about our day cooking at the organic family farm!
Excited for our Thai Cooking Class!
Choosing the Right Thai Cooking Class
There are a number of cooking schools in Chiang Mai to choose from but we decided on Thai Farm Cooking School because of the rave reviews on Trip Advisor. This full day course (approximately 9 am-5 pm) cost us 1500 THB ($45 USD)/person including pickup and drop off from your hotel or hostel in Chiang Mai. It was little more expensive than the $30/person other Thai cooking classes cost, but I’m glad that we went with it. We actually got to cook at the organic family farm, as opposed to other tours that take you to a farm but bring you back into the city to cook. The class was super organized and streamlined to maximize actual time cooking, which we greatly appreciated. Ingredients were super fresh, in abundance and our instructor even took the time to show us how to garnish our dishes for an impressive presentation. We were satisfied and stuffed with delicious, organic, fresh cooked food by the end of class!
Thai Farm Cooking School: The Market
Our day started with a visit for a local market called Ruamchook-market. Our instructor, Gift explained the different varieties of rice, how to make fresh coconut milk and the seasonings used in Thai cooking.
Getting ready for our Thai cooking class
From there we drove about 20 minutes to the organic farm where we we picked and sampled some of the raw ingredients that we would be using right from the source.
Thai Farm Cooking School: The Set Up
Once you arrive at the school, you’re led with your group to the cooking pavilion. There are around 10 people in each group and 5 separate cooking pavilions. In front of each cooking pavilion are gardens with most of the ingredients you’ll be using for the day. Often times you’ll see these spices/ingredients at the store, but never see what they actually look like on the plants they come from. We found the explanation (and sampling) of each ingredient in the garden to be informative and entertaining.
Learning about the ingredients
The Cooking pavilion in set up in a large “U” shape with each person having their own cooking station. There is also a large community style table to eat all of your delicious creations at. Each pavilion has multiple people working to set up for each dish, as well as take care of your dirty dishes when you’re finished cooking/eating (if only it was like this at home!).
Everyone had their own cooking station
We were able to cook 6 dishes during the course of the class including a curry paste, and were given unlimited delicious lemongrass tea, papaya salad, and sticky rice (with a cooking explanation). The great thing about this class was that the ingredients were ready to go and we didn’t have to do dishes which maximized the time spent actually cooking (and eating!).
If only everything I cooked at home came ready like this
Our class started out with a major arm workout! Here is the result of us grinding up curry paste from scratch using a mortar and pestle. Scott chose to make a red curry and I made green curry paste. There was also the option for yellow curry.
Soup
We put our curry pastes to the side for later and I made a Shrimp Tom Yum soup and Scott made Tom Kha. If you have never tried these soups you must! Galangal, kaffir lime, Thai basil, lemongrass, chili, lime juice amongst other ingredients give these soups a unique pop of flavor. The only thing that differentiates the two soups is that Tom Kha has coconut milk.
Tom Kha and Tom Yum soup
Pad Thai
Next we both made a Pad Thai, Scott’s absolute favorite Thai dish! At this point in our trip to Thailand, Scott had literally eaten about 18 Pad Thai’s (one a day, sometimes two if he’s really hungry… and he’s always hungry). I had enjoyed Pad Thai before but was surprised to learn that tamarind is what give it its unique sweet/sour flavor. Scott claims that HIS Pad Thai was the best he had yet. Let’s not give him an even bigger ego, but it may have very well been the best Pad Thai that I had as well.
Best Pad Thai EVER
Curry Time
Getting back to our curry paste, we made our green curry and red curry. This was probably the best curry I have had in my life. I’m not getting prepackaged jars of curry paste anymore. It’s time to get a mortar and pestle, cumin, coriander, chilis, etc. and make it the traditional way from now on! I chose to use just one of those little hot red chilis, unlike the traditional Thai style to literally throw a handful of these fiery suckers in your dish. It was still damn spicy!
Kim’s green curry!
Stir Fry
Next, we made a Thai basil stir fry. I did a vegetarian tofu stir fry and Scott made a chicken stir fry. Lets just say it was arroy ma (Thai for delicious).
Dessert
I wasn’t all that excited to make this last dish, Bananas in coconut milk. How exciting could this dish be? I was SO wrong. This was probably my favorite dish of the entire class. We used pandan leaf juice, fresh palm sugar, cooked the coconut milk and bananas at a high temp on the wok and topped it with sesame seeds, crispy mung beans and pandan leaf garnish. Arroy ma!!!!!
So delicious!
Another reason why we highly recommend this Thai cooking class is that they send you home with a recipe/cook book for all of the dishes. We will definitely be using everything we learned and the recipes in the book when we get home.
If you’re looking for a way to utilize credit card/hotel points in Chiang Mai for a place to stay, consider the Holiday Inn Chiang Mai. At only 10,000 IHG points per night, your points can go a long way. If you were to sign up for the Chase IHG rewards select card and get the initial sign up bonus of 60,000 IHG points (current bonus, but may change), you could stay for 6 nights for free! Look for a post on how to maximize hotel points in Southeast Asia soon! See our favorite cards for free travel here.
Thanks to our instructor Gift, and Thai Farm Cooking School for a fantastic class, full bellies and memories to last a lifetime! Now where in Dallas Texas do I buy galangal?!
Don’t miss out on this class!
You two are so cute! And that sounds like it was so much fun!!
Wahou! This seems like a wonderful experience! so cool!
Thank so much!