This blog talks about the 4th Intermediate class in Kasma’s 4-session Intermediate Thai Cooking Series, the sequel to her 4-session Beginning Series. The recipes for this class are all items that are commonly consumed as street food: Grilled Chicken, Satay with Peanut Sauce, Green Papaya Salad and Fried Bananas.
I’ve already blogged on the first three classes in the series:
- Kasma’s Intermediate Thai Cooking Class #1
- Kasma’s Intermediate Thai Cooking Class #2
- Kasma’s Intermediate Thai Cooking Class #3
This class begins differently than previous classes. Both the grilled chicken and the satay need to marinate for a couple of hours so as soon as the students arrive, they are put right to work making the marinades. Once the marinades are done and the meats are absorbing all those wonderful flavors, Kasma talks about the recipes, going over details, new ingredients and techniques.
(Click images to see larger version.)
There are several important and notable techniques in this class. One of the most important is learning how to make Green Papaya Salad (Som Tam). After going over the recipes, Kasma gets out her large wooden mortar and pestle (you can also use a clay, or “Lao” mortar and pestle) and demonstrates how to make her version of this dish, which includes salted crabs and is ped, ped, brio, brio – hot and sour!
Kasma also demonstrates the easiest way to crack open a coconut. For some reason, Western chefs (and even some Thai chefs) commonly teach a method where you drain the liquid from the coconut after piercing the “eyes” with an ice-pick or a Phillips head screwdriver. Some of these methods involve wrapping the drained coconut in a towel and smashing it with a hammer. These actions are unnecessary and make a simple, quick action into a time-consuming mess!
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There’s no reason to pre-drain the coconut. Just crack it open over a bowl to catch the coconut water; you can run it through a sieve later to get rid of any bits of shell or meat in the liquid. Rather than smashing the coconut into pieces, it’s really quite easy to use the dull end of a cleaver and crack the coconut into two halves by going around the equator. While those other expert chefs are still waiting for their liquid to drain, you could crack open several coconuts!
Check out our video of Kasma demonstrating this method on our website – Cracking A Coconut: The Easy Way – or on YouTube – Cracking a Coconut.
After it’s cracked open, Kasma shows how to use a small scraper to get coconut shreds to use in her Fried Banana Recipe
Another technique that needs to be explained is how to cut the chicken used for the satay. In making satay, the meat should be cut against the grain into a certain size to facilitate putting the meat evenly on the skewers. The meat is cut into smaller pieces prior to being placed in the marinade: that way more of the surface area will get coated with the tasty mixture.
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After the satay has sat in the marinade for a couple of hours, it’s ready to be placed onto the skewer. Kasma demonstrates and then it becomes a communal effort, with Kasma handy to provide feedback and correction as needed.
Much of the cooking in this class is done outside on the grill. Kasma supervises while students baste the meats and turn them over. Kasma uses mesquite charcoal rather than briquets to mirror what is used in Thailand, where briquets are not used. Mesquite tends to burn very hot at the start so it requires frequent turning of the meat so that the outside will not get blackened. The satay is grilled on two smaller grills.
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Both the Grilled Chicken and Green Papaya Salad are from Isan (or Isaan) (northeastern Thailand). Kasma serves white sticky rice, the preferred rice in the northeast, with this meal, cooking it in the traditional bamboo basket arrangement pictured to the right. (See Kasma’s recipe for Steamed White Sticky Rice (Kao Niow Neung).)
Once students have completed this Intermediate Series, they are eligible to go onto Kasma’s advanced classes. Currently there are 8 evening Advanced Series of 4 classes and 4 weeklong Advanced classes – both evening and weeklong classes cover pretty much the same recipes, with a few exceptions. The Advanced classes open up an entire world of Thai cooking that is unknown to anyone who’s not visited Thailand (and some who have!). Kasma estimates that the restaurants here in the U.S. offer only about 5% of the total number of recipes available in Thai cuisine. The Advanced Classes are a chance to learn about the other 95% and, best of all, to sample how they taste. I invite you to explore the Thai Cooking Class Menus – Advanced Series to see some of the variety that is available in the classes. You can also read my blog on The Best Thai Food in America?, which goes over just one meal in one of the weeklong Advanced classes. I really should take the question mark out of the title!
Menu – Intermediate Thai Cooking Class Series #4
Thai-Style Marinated Grilled Chicken Served with Sweet and Tangy Dipping Sauce (Gai Yang Song Kreuang)
Grilled chicken is found all over Thailand as a street food. The vendors who make and sell Gai Yang, like many vendors, largely hail from northeastern Thailand or Isan (also spelled Isaan). Kasma’s version has a very tasty marinade that includes coriander seeds and curry sauce – it grills up very nicely and is delicious. I have never seen grilled chicken in Thailand served without a dipping sauce and Kasma’s is no exception. Her sauce uses dried red hot chillies and comes out with a tasty blend of sweet and sour flavors, with a bit of salty as well. It’s a great sauce and any leftover can be refrigerated almost indefinitely.
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Hot-and Sour Thai-Style Green Papaya Salad (Som Tam Thai)
Is there a more quintessential street food that Som Tam – Green Papaya Salad? The word som means “sour” and tam means “to pound,” for this salad is made in a mortar and pestle. There are other Som Tam salads that do not use green papaya but are made in a somewhat similar fashion.
Green Papaya by itself is fairly bland: it’s pounded lightly to soften it up and help it to absorb the flavors which are salty (from fish sauce), sour (from limes), hot-spicy (from Thai chillies) and also a bit of sweet (from palm sugar). When you order from a street vendor, you specify the flavors you wish to emphasize; Kasma always orders ped, ped, brio, brio - ped being spicy-hot and brio meaning sour - and she makes her Som Tam the same way. As is often found in Thailand, Kasma includes whole salted crabs, separated into pieces, in her recipe, to provide a bit of salty flavor (you suck the salty brine out of the pieces) and a bit more texture. The result is a fiery, sour delight.
You may enjoy the following:
- Kasma’s recipe for Green Papaya Salad (Som Tam)
- Kasma’s blog on Salted Crab – (Boo Kem).
- Kasma’s article on Green Papaya
Chicken Satay (Sateh Gai)
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Satay (Sateh) is another quintessential street food. You can find it on the street and in many markets, being grilled over charcoal. Kasma teaches it with two meats: chicken and pork. The secret is in cutting the meat just right as described above. One trick Kasma uses is to put the meat in the freezer until it firms up to make it easier to cut into uniform peaces of the correct size. Satay is nearly always served with . . .
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Spicy Satay Peanut Sauce (Nam Jim Tua)
Kasma’s peanut sauce has many ingredients and takes a while to make and it is the most flavorful peanut sauce I’ve ever tasted. The key to the flavor is the roasted spices (cumin, coriander seed and dried red chillies). The base is coconut milk and ground peanuts.
Kasma prefers not to use peanut butter. As she said in her first cookbook It Rains Fishes: Legends, Traditions and The Joys of Thai Cooking, “Many cookbooks advise you to use peanut butter for making peanut sauces, but I think peanut butter always tastes like peanut butter no matter what you do to it.” Peanut butter is really an American invention, not Asian. Besides, it’s the work of a minute to grind the peanuts in a clean coffee grinder. Since they are ground on the spot, they retain their freshness and flavor. You’ll get a lighter-tasting sauce and the flavor of the peanuts will blend in more intricately with the spice flavors.
If you have leftovers of this sauce, you can serve it on other meats or even on vegetables: steamed vegetables topped with this peanut sauce are delicious.
This is one of the few Thai recipes to truly feature peanuts. Peanuts appear in some curries and salads such as Som Tam (Green Papaya Salad) but are not a very important ingredient in Thai cooking. In fact, peanut sauces, such as this one, actually originated further down the Malay peninsula and in the Indonesian archipelago where they dominate the offerings in food bazaars and streetside stalls as well as in refined restaurants.
It’s a mystery why many recipes that are falsely labelled “Thai” have virtually nothing used in Thai cuisine except peanuts. Check out Kasma’s feature article on Peanuts & Thai Cuisine.
Fried Bananas (Kluay Tod)
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Fried Bananas – Kluay Tod - are another treat found as street food, in markets throughout Thailand and in some restaurants. Kasma’s version uses a secret ingredient to make the batter extremely light and crispy: her version tastes delightful.
In this class she also fried up some strawberries as an extra treat. You can fry many other fruits with this batter and they taste delicious. This is partly because of the batter: there are usually a few scraps of the batter left and students usually eat those random pieces up, as well, because they taste so good.
Slideshow For Grilled Chicken – Gai Yang
Click on “Play” below to begin a slideshow.
Clicking on a slide will take you to the next image.
Don’t miss:
- Kasma’s Intermediate Thai Cooking Class #1
- Kasma’s Intermediate Thai Cooking Class #2
- Kasma’s Intermediate Thai Cooking Class #3
I’ve already blogged on Kasma’s Beginning Thai Cooking Series:
- Beginning Thai Cooking with Kasma, Class #1.
- Beginning Thai Cooking with Kasma, Class #2.
- Beginning Thai Cooking with Kasma, Class #3.
- Beginning Thai Cooking with Kasma, Class #4.
You can find out all the necessary details about class times, dates and policies on our website.
- Schedule of classes
- Details – times, policies, etc.
- Evening Class Menus
- Kasma’s Picasa Albums – including 100s of photos, mostly of advanced classes.
- Kasma’s Yelp Reviews – includes many reviews from weeklong students; be sure to check out the pictures on Yelp.
- The Spirit of Thai Cooking – tells you more about Kasma’s philosophy of food and cooking
Written by Michael Babcock, June 2013





























































































































































































