Travel diary #2: The one with the 2 secret ingredients in Thai food
July 6th, 2016
We booked a Thai Cooking Class with Thai Akha Cooking School.
The pickup from our hotel was between 6h30 and 7AM.
At that time we still didn’t have a good routine. We would sleep late at night around 1AM and wake up at 11AM.
So, waking up at 6AM was a challenge for us.
We were the first guests to be picked up. After almost 45min of rolling around in Chiang Mai to pickup all the guests, we finally arrived at a local market.
Our host took us around all the stalls. It’s impressive to see how much the prices are low there.
From one stall to another, she taught us the Thai name of some vegetables. The only one I remember is the pumpkin called “fokyu” ^^ (or maybe it was not pumpkin?)
She bought all the ingredients we need to do make our own dishes.
We ate 11 different dishes. And we prepared only 4 dishes by ourselves: spring rolls, papaya salad, red curry (we prepared our own curry paste) and pad thai.
The other dishes were cooked by our host: the “fokyu” soup, mango sticky rice, … (I can’t remember now but you can check on their website ^^)
With this “fokyu” soup we learned how to make it sweeter without using sugar. The secret ingredient is… salt!
Also, we learned that if your dish is too spicy or salty, you add sugar.
But if your dish is too sweet, then it’s game over 🙂
Lessons learned
- Add sugar if you find your dish too salty or spicy
- Add salt if you wanna enhance the flavor of your dish (even sweets!)
- “Fokyu” means pumpkin (or maybe not) 😛