During July and August, Thai cooking teacher Kasma Loha-unchit offers weeklong Thai cooking classes in the San Francisco Bay Area for people who want to learn how to cook Thai food as authentic and delicious as that found in Thailand. The classes are called “intensives” because for 5 straight days you spend all day learning, cooking and eating Thai food. In this blog we’ll try to give you a sense of what these classes are like.
Click images to see larger version. There’s also a slideshow further down.
Overview
Kasma demonstrates Green Papaya Salad
Kasma, who offered 4-session evening series classes starting in 1985, began offering these classes in 1998 because of requests from people who discovered the classes through Kasma’s website – thaifoodandtravel.com. She very quickly began offering two of the First Week intensives each summer along with two advanced weeklong classes. Hundreds of people from all over the world have attended the First Week class, many of them going on to take the Advanced weeklong classes as well.
Kasma teaches all of her classes in her home. The more casual and intimate setting allows people to relax more and to get to know one another. Since most students will be cooking in their home kitchen, it makes sense to learn in a home kitchen similar to what they will find when they return home.
Thai food - what it's all about
The First Week combines the evening Beginning Series and evening Intermediate Series with some extras; it introduces most important Thai ingredients and many of the cooking techniques, including using the mortar and pestle to make pastes. The First Week lays the foundation of how to balance flavor groupings to create Thai tastes, whether using a recipe or not. Everyone starts with the First Week: it’s the only way Kasma can insure that everyone in the Advanced classes has a common set of essential information and that everyone has been exposed to harmonizing Thai flavors. Many of the recipes in the First Week are familiar to anyone exposed to Thai restaurants in the U.S. – Basil Chicken, Green Curry, Shrimp Cakes, Pad Thai noodles – to name a few. Here are the First Week Menus.
The classes are great fun
In the Advanced weeklong classes more Thai ingredients (less common ones) are introduced along with new techniques and the refining and expansion of previous techniques. In addition to more familiar recipes, the Advanced classes include more recipes that are not so common in this country. Kasma estimates that the Thai restaurants in the U.S. offer around 5% of the total number of dishes in Thailand; the advanced weeklong classes are a chance to learn how to cook and to eat many of the other 95% of Thai dishes. Kasma started out with just one Advanced weeklong class and added 3 more in response to demand from students, who wanted to keep learning more dishes and more about Thai food. Check out the Advanced Weeklong Menus – be sure to scroll down to check out the dishes in all 4 Advanced weeklong classes.
Format
One morning's breakfast
The format of all of the classes is the same. Class always starts with a delicious breakfast consisting of pastries and cheese breads from local (mostly co-operative) bakeries, organic heirloom tomatoes and tree-ripened organic fruits from the Berkeley Farmers market, quail eggs with Thai dipping sauces and a different Asian snack each day. Peet’s coffee and a selection of teas are also served. The breakfasts are fantastic!
After breakfast, everyone sits at the long table and Kasma goes over each of the recipes. This teaching session necessarily takes a bit longer in the First Week class: Kasma needs to introduce the ingredients for the first time as she goes over each of the recipes. Questions are encouraged and part of the process involves smelling, tasting and touching Thai herbs and some comparative tasting (of coconut milks, for example). Class most days starts at 9:30 a.m. and the sitting instruction can last anywhere from 2 to 2-1/2 hours (there’s a break in the middle to sample more of the breakfast).
Students prepping dishes
Chopping & pounding
After the initial instruction, the group breaks up into teams, each team working on 1 or 2 recipes; each team does all of the prep with Kasma supervising and instructing further as needed. After the ingredients are prepared, the food is assembled. Unlike other classes, the assembly is done as a group: everyone gets to watch each dish being cooked and finished. Initially (the first day or two) Kasma does much of the assembly herself and each day students take over more and more of the work, with Kasma watching. Each dish is designed to serve many people: you learn to cook dishes exactly the way you would cook them at home.
Folding banana leaves
Making roti
Assembling Pork Rice Soup
Assembly of many of the dishes involves a series of tasting exercises. The essence of Kasma’s classes is learning to balance flavors. (See Kasma’s article Creating Harmonies with Primary Flavors.) Most of Kasma’s recipes give a range of quantity for many key flavoring ingredients, such as fish sauce, lime juice or palm sugar, because these ingredients can vary widely and blindly following a recipe with just a set quality may not produce a very tasty dish. (See the blog Following Thai Recipes.) Kasma will add a certain quantity of an ingredient, say fish sauce, and then everyone gets a chance to taste what the dish tastes like; more fish sauce, or palm sugar, or lime juice will be added and after each addition, there’s another tasting and students get to see how the flavors interact and how they become more layered and more complex, sometimes with just a small extra addition of something. I’ve had many experiences with these tasting exercises where I thought something tasted really, really good – I would have stopped right there. Then Kasma adds just a bit more of something and the flavors POP!!! into a revelation. It’s a chance to see, to experience the alchemy of Thai cooking.
A team of students
Each day there’s a dish or two that is cooked earlier on to serve as lunch or as asnack to bridge the time until you sit down to eat a Thai feast around 3:00 or 3:30 p.m. Most people find they don’t need to worry about eating dinner – they go away very full indeed! We provide beer or wine, as desired, and lemon- or limeade. Each day finishes with a Thai dessert. These classes are a great way to try some of the wonderful variety of Thai kanom wahn (“sweet snacks”).
One day during most of the weeklong classes is a one-dish meal day. You’ll learn many noodle dishes, from familiar dishes, such as Pad Thai, to the other noodle dishes that Thai people actually prefer: such as Stewed Duck Noodles, Boat Noodles and Kao Soi (Chiang Mai Curried Noodles). Some of the non-noodle (one-dish meal) dishes include Kao Man Gai (Poached Chicken Rice), Salted Black Olive Rice, Muslim Yellow Rice and Pork Rice Soup.
Charcoal Roasted Sea Bass
The last day is a little different. We start Friday with a 2-hour or so field trip to the Old Oakland Farmer’s Market, with its many Asian vendors, and to some of Kasma’s favorite markets in Oakland’s Chinatown. This is a chance for students to learn how to negotiate Asian markets and to learn about some of the exotic Asian ingredients that are found there. Every single one of our Advanced weeklong classes has wanted Kasma to include the optional field trip. We then return and assemble the day’s meal, which always includes grilled dishes on Friday, and on this day we eat out in Kasma’s beautiful garden.
After the First Week class you will have been introduced to most of the important Thai ingredients, will know most of the main cooking techniques and will understand how to balance the flavor groupings to make delicious Thai flavors, with or without a recipe. You will have over 40 delicious Thai recipes with which to amaze and delight your friends. Be warned, you may find out, as have many students over the years, that you no longer wish to eat in local Thai restaurants because the Thai food is better at home!
Advanced Class Format
The format is essentially the same – breakfast, initial instruction and then breaking into teams, coming together so that everyone can see how a dish is cooked and finished. In the advanced weeks, students do pretty much everything under Kasma’s supervision.
Each Advanced weeklong class has 40 to 45 delicious Thai recipes. Many of these are dishes seldom seen outside of Thailand. You’ll be able to cook dishes at home that you can’t find in the local Thai restaurants. After you’ve taken the First Week and all 4 Advanced weeklong classes, you’ll have well over 200 Thai recipes to choose from.
Weeklong Food Sampling
Click on “Play” below to begin a slideshow.
Clicking on a slide will take you to the next image.
Why Take This Class
There’s an English proverb that dates back to the early 1600s that says: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” A cooking class can be lots of fun but ultimately you want to know that what you are learning to make is fabulous food.
Dinner in the garden
People take the First Week class pretty much for one reason: to learn how to cook delicious Thai food. After the First Week, people return for multiple reasons: to learn more about Thai cooking, because they had so much fun the first week and to eat. They come to learn to cook Thai dihes that they don’t find anywhere else outside of Thailand. Always, though, the main reason people return is because the food is so fabulous. I challenge you to check out the menu for any day of any of the advanced classes and tell me where else in the United States you could eat that meal. (The food in the First Week is fabulous as well; that First Week people don’t believe us when we say the food in the Advanced classes is even better.) We have students who tell us that Kasma’s food is even better than what they have in Thailand. People return time after time – many people have taken all 5 of the weeklong classes and regularly ask us when Kasma will offer the 6th – because the food is so good. Several people have repeated one or more of the Advanced Weeklong classes because they wanted their Thai food hit. Other students go on to take the evening series Advanced classes.
Sitting down to eat
Eating Outside
We are currently enrolling people for the July & August 2012 classes. If you’re interested, please check out some of the links below and then get in touch.
Details
You can find out all the necessary details about class times, dates and policies on our website.
- Schedule of classes
- Details – times, policies, etc.
- Class Menus
- Kasma’s Picasa Albums – including 100s of photos, mostly of Advanced Weeklong 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
Kasma stir-fries Pad Thai
Written by Michael Babcock, October 2011
