Blue Elephant Cooking School, Bangkok, Thailand, tasted on December 5, 2005 — A semi-regular feature of any tourist adventure in Thailand (especially when visiting Bangkok or Chiang Mai) is a cooking class. I was both excited to learn some basic Thai cooking skills, and leery of a tourist trap. I told myself that I would find some small hip cooking school that was off the beaten track in terms of tourists. Unsurprisingly, I failed. After the 27th time when I tried to get someone to recommend me the little known authentic Thai cooking class, and the response was "Blue Elephant Cooking School. It's the most famous." I gave in. Besides, they had a class that started off with a trip to the market. And that seemed like a nice way to start.

The Blue Elephant Cooking School is located in a cool colonial style building (note: not sure if this is an appropriate characterization as Thailand is the only country in the immediate vicinity that was never colonized) on this small parcel of land surrounded by the tumult and height of Bangkok. The first hour or so of our class was spent heading to a local market. I thought we would buy the ingredients we were going to cook. But in retrospect that was silly. The Blue Elephant had their act together and already had all the ingredients we needed. Our trip to the market was most informational though not functional and that was ok. Then it was back to the school for some instruction and hopefully cooking.

It turns out, that despite being the "most famous" cooking school, the class was pretty enjoyable. Even though we were on rails (the ingredients had mostly been prepped for us) my dishes came out as good or better than most Thai food I've had in the U.S. The chef kept repeating this as well showing his disdain for the quality of many Thai restaurants.

I was worried at the beginning when we entered a standard classroom setting that we'd only be watching him cook, but after each demo we went to a kitchen across the room where we got to cook ourselves. It was cool. One weird moment was when he warned us about the unripe papaya juice saying it would hurt our eyes and stain our clothes but it was ok to eat. I guess unripe papaya juice is essentially edible bleach.

We learned and cooked several dishes including: Green Chicken Curry (Keang Keaw Wan Kai), Sour and  Spicy Prawn Soup (Tom Yam Koong), Stir Fried Rice Noodles (Phad Thai), and Green Papaya Salad (Som Tam). The chef really took the time to try to articulate what the flavor of each dish should be. He'd learned Thai cooking at his mother's side and had many years as a professional chef. I remember him going on at length about how the sweet flavor should never come first on your tongue. For me this was huge. Thai food is one of those cuisines (like Mexican) where the uninitiated joke about how it's the same seven ingredients and flavors recombined in hundreds of slightly different combinations. But this is missing the point. There is not only wide variety in Thai food but strict discipline in terms of flavor profile and balance. And while I wasn't happy that I made my green curry three hours before I ate it at the sit down "luncheon" (not sure what the alternative was) it turns out that our food came out pretty good anyway. In fact, I think the food that I made  that day was better than almost every Thai restaurant in Seattle. Unfortunately that's not saying a whole lot, but still I was impressed. Whether I can duplicate it in my kitchen is another matter entirely, but I will have fun trying.