Any adventurous home cook will have tried difficult recipes using unusual ingredients but the results can vary — from being a brave attempt to downright disgusting.
Taking a short cooking class while on a foreign adventure can make the unfamiliar a little less so, and give you something to take home that won't bore the neighbours and may even wow your friends.
Mrs Thanaporn Gaetz is better known as Chef Leez and has run her own cookery school since 2011 in suburban Bangkok, about a 40-minute drive from the centre of town.
Leez's neighbourhood could be anywhere in suburban Auckland — with temperature and humidity similar to ours in February: neat single-level houses sitting side by side, with trees sprouting from the footpath, front gardens and peeking over rooftops — a far cry from the skyscraper forest of downtown Bangkok.
Double front gates open inward to where the garage once stood, but has been converted into a two-room kitchen studio: one air-conditioned for instruction and prep; the other for the cooking.
Leez is standing at the gates when we arrive, a diminutive woman dressed in chef's whites, a bright-red apron and a colourful head scarf.
Her smile is as warm as a Tom Yum soup and she wastes no time in getting us inside into the pristine air-conditioned studio, wearing our own red aprons.
Her introduction is a well-rehearsed run-down of the dishes we're about to learn and a taster of the basic ingredients from which many Thai dishes are created: coconut, lemongrass, galangal, tamarind, kaffir lime, Thai aubergine, shrimp, fish oil, coriander and, of course, chillies.
She explains how each family would have their own coconut trees in years gone by and that each tree will produce about 60 nuts per year, before demonstrating how to open one and how to scrape the flesh from inside the shell.
Soaking the nut in water for an hour before opening was a good trick.
Soon we're getting our hands mucky, making coconut cream by pouring a cup of water over the finely shredded flesh and squeezing the sticky liquid out before repeating two or three times more to get the slightly less-concentrated coconut milk.
We could go on and make oil using the same coconut, but we don't have time here. This is the first time we'll hear her well-worn phrase "Grandma says ... " to highlight how we can use more from our food, not to waste anything, save money and be more sustainable.
Leez goes on to explain how to shop for the best ingredients and the difference between good and bad oil, fish sauce and shrimps: coconut oil should go solid in cool temperatures, fish sauce should be clear and light brown but will suffer from evaporation and darkening with age (this is okay), and raw shrimps should be a uniform grey colour with a slightly darker patch at the base of the head — the head will blacken with age.
We learn how to peel and de-vein the shrimp ("clean out the poo") and how to spot when the unscrupulous dress up their wares to charge a higher, if unwarranted, price.
With the basics out of the way, we're chopping, crushing, pounding, mixing and frying our way through half a dozen or more tasty treats: tom yum chilli paste (nam phrik phao); spicy and sour prawn soup (tom yum goong); fried noodles with prawns (pad thai); green curry (gaeng keaw); massaman curry; stir-fried chicken with holy basil (pad kra-pao gai) and green papaya salad (som tom ma la o), sampling each as we go.
At some point during the whirlwind of tasty Thai training, Leez's husband comes in to thank us for choosing this class. A westerner who handles the website and bookings, he reckons the food we ate that day is the best Thai food we'll taste anywhere in the world.
Having eaten Thai food many times in numerous cities around the world before this class, and for several days in Bangkok following, I reckon he's absolutely right.
Checklist
GETTING THERE
Thai Airways flies Auckland to Bangkok with return Economy Class fares starting from $1080.
DETAILS
Classes at Chef Leez cooking school cost approximately $100pp.
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