Travelers' Tales Thailand: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides)

by James O'Reilly

  The direction of the school and the man largely responsible for its excellence is Chalie Amatyakul. A native Thai, Chalie is a cosmopolitan fellow who studied literature in France and interior design in Vienna for several years after graduating with a degree in political science from Bangkok’s prestigious Chulalongkorn University. He has traveled extensively around the world pursuing a career that has included stints as sales manager and food and beverage director for the Oriental. Successful as he’s been in the hotel business, he seems to have found his real métier with the Thai Cooking School. A born teacher, Chalie is passionate about Thai food, and he shares that enthusiasm with an almost missionary zeal. He is both knowledgeable and articulate on the subject, and not just in his native tongue. His fluency in English, French, and German has served him well in tutoring the large number of American and European students who have attended the school since it opened in June, 1986.

  The Thai Cooking School at The Oriental has been in the capable hands of Sansern Gajaseni for more than nine years.The class is now held over a four-day period, rather than five, and covers the topics of snacks, salads, soups, condiments, steamed/fried/stir-fried/grilled dishes, and desserts. The facility remains largely unchanged and true to its innovative designer, Chalie Amatyakul.

  —Susan Brady, “Dream Come True”

  Chalie’s interest in food goes back to his childhood when, as the youngest of five children in an old aristocratic family, he learned to cook by hanging around the kitchen and helping out when needed. “To know how a dish was supposed to taste I had to learn how it was made,” explained Chalie. “My mother supervised the household and trained her children to supervise, which included being able to tell servants how to do something.”

  As food and beverage director of the Oriental in the early 1980s, he was instrumental in setting up the hotel’s Thai restaurant, the Sala Rim Naam, and many of the recipes prepared there today are taught at the school. He also helped develop the catering and banquet business for the Oriental, getting involved in all aspects of party planning from costumes and decorations to flower arrangements. So creative were his events that he caught the attention of Thailand’s Queen Sirikit, who continues to hire him to cater state functions. He even accompanied the queen on her 1985 tour of the United States and single-handedly organized receptions she hosted in New York and Los Angeles.

  Thai cuisine conveniently falls into five general categories of dishes, giving Chalie a natural structure for the week’s classes, beginning with snacks and salads and moving through soups and curries to stir-fried, steamed, and grilled dishes before ending with desserts.

  Despite its hotel connections, the Thai Cooking School is open to anyone, but the extras such as meals and tours are available only to guests at the Oriental. The complete course runs from Sunday night, with an introductory dinner at the Sala Rim Naam, through Friday noon and features such added amenities as breakfast every morning at the Oriental’s Verandah restaurant and a lunchtime sampling of the hotel’s other restaurants, including Lord Jim’s. Also included in the tuition are a private tour guide for two afternoons of sightseeing and three dinners: a barbeque buffet at the Oriental’s Riverside Terrace; an elegant French respite from Thai food at the Normandie, and an interesting interpretation of what’s been called “nouvelle Thai” at the Lemongrass, a local Bangkok favorite lodged in an antique-filled converted townhouse. There are clearly more than enough opportunities to eat during the week’s course, and tastings of the dishes prepared in class each morning were so ample that I often skipped the hotel lunch.

  The school can handle up to twenty people, but I was fortunate to have chosen a week when only one other student, a horticulturist from Greenwich, Connecticut, had signed up for the full course. Except for the two days when we were joined by an Australian homemaker and a New York-based book editor, my classmate and I had virtually private lessons. For someone visiting Bangkok for less than a week, it is possible to spend as little as one day at the school.

  What I particularly liked about the classes is that they gave me a structure for my time in Bangkok. By steeping myself in Thai cooking each morning, my forays into the city streets each afternoon became more meaningful. Whether I was headed for a shopping spree or sight-seeing, I was bombarded with the sights and smells of food, which were always exotic and often quite pungent.

  Bangkok, among its other reputations, is clearly a city of gustatory pleasures. Never before had I seen so many stalls selling all manner of snacks and freshly sliced fruit, or wandered in so many street markets, or passed so many individual farmers who had staked out a square of sidewalk from which to sell their produce—all of them offering countless opportunities, if not to indulge then at least to view the incredible variety of raw ingredients and in many cases to watch them being cooked. Whatever questions I had about what I’d seen would be answered in class the next morning.

  The school is housed—rather appropriately it seemed—in a 19th-century colonial teak structure that was formerly a riverside mansion. It stands next to the Sala Rim Naam restaurant, which is across the busy Chao Phraya river, directly opposite the modern River Wing tower of the Oriental. Each morning, after a breakfast of fresh papaya and toast, the latter serving purely as a vehicle for the dark and bittersweet pummelo marmalade made by the Oriental, I headed for the hotel dock to catch the private ferry. I looked forward to this ride, during which the ferry crossed the commercial lanes of traffic like a fearless jaywalker to the Thon Buri bank of the river. When the Oriental’s boat wasn’t immediately available, I’d spend the equivalent of a nickel to take the local ferry filled with Thais on their way to work. From the Thon Buri dock it was a short walk past lush greenery and through the veranda-like private dining rooms at the front of the building to the two classroms in the rear.

  Despite the fact that both rooms were air-conditioned, Chalie, who helped design the school facility, left intact the natural ventilation that was ingeniously incorporated into the original building. The system takes the form of an open-air clerestory: decoratively shaped holes are cut out repeatedly along the top of all four walls, like a string of paper dolls. Hot air rises up and out of the rooms through the clerestory, and fresh breezes find their way in.

  Dining choices in Thailand range from five-star hotel restaurants to simple foodstalls on the side of the road. First-time visitors sometimes dismiss hawker food as unclean and assume that any meal served on a rickety aluminum table must be inferior to a first-class restaurant. Nothing could be further from the truth. If a steady queue of Mercedeses waiting for noodle soup is any indication, hawker food provides stiff competition for many of Thailand’s finer restaurants. In fact, street food should be your first choice for several reasons. Large congregations of foodstalls in a single location ensure a greater array of food than in any single restaurant. Secondly, since there is virtually no overhead, prices are kept low—a filling and delicious meal can be served for less than $2. But perhaps most importantly, foodstall dining is a great way to meet people, make friends, and gain some insight into Thai lifestyles.

  —Carl Parkes, Thailand Handbook

  We reported each morning to a room filled with rows of mahogany desks facing a blackboard. Each desk was topped neatly with a stack of recipes, a small vase of orchids, and a cup and saucer for coffee—a far cry from the classrooms of my youth. On our first morning we opened our desk drawers to find an apron and sacks of Thai spices to take home, as well as such staples as naam pla, the fermented fish sauce that is to the Thais what soy sauce is to the Chinese, and a bottle of Chalie’s favorite brand of Sriracha chili sauce.

  Each class began with a brief but by no means lightweight lecture on the background of the dishes to be demonstrated that day. Chalie made active use of the blackboard, which simplified our personal note taking. After about a half hour we would move to the demonstration room, which resembled a chemistry laboratory, with three long marble-topped teak units and an overhead mirror.

  The in
gredients for each dish, already pounded, chopped, or shredded, would be waiting in small bowls arranged on large platters, a welcome sight considering this labor-intensive cuisine. Chalie, with the help of his assistant, Sarnsern, performed a show-and-tell with the components of the recipes, encouraging us to smell and taste the raw ingredients to get a better understanding of their unique role in the complexity of flavor in Thai food.

  For me it was my first encounter with certain exotic fruits, vegetables, herbs, and other seasonings that until then I’d only heard about or seen in their barely recognizable dried state. Here, at last, in the raw, was kha, or greater galanga, the ginger-like rhizome native to Indonesia. A sniff of greater galanga revealed its kinship to turmeric, itself another rhizome used fresh in Thai cooking; I was reminded instantly of ball-park mustard, which derives its characteristically bright yellow color from powdered turmeric.

  Also new to me were kaffir limes and their leaves. Years before I’d seen dried kaffir lime leaves stuffed in little plastic bags in New York’s Chinatown and never knew that they grow in pairs, almost piggyback style on the stem, the tip of one leaf barely overlapping the end of the one ahead of it. Infused with a citrus perfume, the bright green leaves were shredded fine and added at the last minute to soups and curries. The kaffir limes resembled the limes we are accustomed to in color only. In stark contrast to the smooth-skinned fruit we’re familiar with, the kaffir limes were a mass of knobby little bumps, a curious trait that didn’t prevent the rind from being grated and added as still another lemon-lime accent to Thai food.

  As we were led through each step in the preparation of a dish, Chalie proved to be an overflowing font of information, suggesting all kinds of variations and substitutions. We often found ourselves scribbling down extra recipes and procedures Chalie rattled off from memory.

  For the actual cooking we gathered around large, free-standing gas burners in the kitchen, which was separated from the demonstration room by glass doors. Although the classes were predominantly demonstration here, we had the chance to try our own hand at certain techniques, sometimes quite literally as when we learned to drizzle beaten egg from our hands in a crosshatch pattern onto a skillet to make a woven-looking egg sheet.

  The cooking equipment was unlike any I’d seen before, especially the striking brass woks, with their gleaming golden color and distinctive, unusual shape. Unlike Chinese-style woks, which feature narrow bottoms and sharply sloping sides, the Thai brass woks had wide, softly rounded bottoms and barely flaring sides. Originally designed for the preparation of desserts, the woks eventually proved their versatility as efficient vessels for stir-frying, deep-frying, and the reduction of liquids. Although Chinese woks are used widely in Thailand, Chalie prefers the elegance of the brass version. The brass woks retain their shiny look even after long contact with flames on the stove, and so, frequent usage notwithstanding, the woks stay as beautiful to cook in as they are to serve from—the ideal kitchen-to-table-ware.

  The mottled brown ladles and spatulas at the school were fashioned from coconut shells, a testament to both the ingenuity of the Thais and the profusion of coconuts. Made by the hill tribes near Chiang Mai in the northern part of Thailand, the coconut utensils are not readily found in Bangkok, but by sheer luck I happened upon a woman selling them at the sprawling weekend market just outside central Bangkok in Chatuchak Park. Whether one is interested in coconut utensils or not, the Chatuchak market is well worth the taxi ride to see the assortment of items—produce, jeans, dried fish, pets, plants, fabric, ceramics, counterfeit tapes, and the like—all being sold in one vast, tented area.

  In designing the curriculum for the cooking school, Chalie researched recipes in many cookbooks, some of which were over a hundred years old. He tried several versions of a classic dish before determining the best one for the classes, keeping in mind not only what would be most representative of Thai cooking but what would translate easily to a typical Western kitchen. From his travels Chalie was aware of the limited availability of Thai ingredients in the West and kindly considered that fact when choosing recipes to demonstrate.

  If I had to describe the classes in one word, it would be intensive. For a Westerner there is a great deal to learn about the raw materials even before commencing on the procedures for combining them in a recipe. Take coconut milk, for example, one of the most distinctive flavors in Thai food. Although a vessel of coconut milk is always on hand at the school, and freshly grated coconut is sold in all the markets, we had to learn to make it from scratch. That process alone involved cracking open a mature coconut, prying out the flesh, finely grating the meat, mixing it with water, and squeezing out the milky white liquid. The result was coconut milk in its simplest form.

  But it didn’t stop there. In some recipes the Thais make a distinction between coconut cream and coconut milk. The cream is a more concentrated extraction using half the amount of water used for coconut milk. This procedure can be followed by a second extraction, using more water and the same grated coconut to make a thin milk. In these coconut extractions the Thais have both a fat and a dairylike liquid. The cream, when boiled and reduced to release its oil, becomes the fat for cooking seasonings, and the milk becomes the liquid base for curries and soups.

  Needless to say, making coconut milk is a time-consuming process, and the results depend on flavorful coconuts, which are often difficult to find in Western markets. Fortunately, good, unsweetened coconut milk is available either frozen or canned in Asian markets in major cities in the United States.

  Thai food uses three varieties of fresh basil. The Thais are quite particular about their herbs. Each type of basil has its specific role.

  Bai horapha is similar to the Italian basil that Americans and Europeans sprinkle over sliced tomatoes or blend into pesto as a sauce for pasta. In Thailand bai horapha, or basil-basil as it is also called, tends to be confined to the more refined, city-style of cooking, making frequent appearances in coconut milk-based dishes. When we prepared panaeng nuea (beef curry) in class, bai horapha leaves were stirred into the mixture at the last moment to wilt them and infuse the curry with their mild anise flavor.

  Bai manglug, known elsewhere as sweet balsam or lime basil, has small, paler leaves reminiscent of our dwarf basil. In Thailand sweet balsam is usually added to soups, although it is sometimes sprinkled raw over salads and fish curries.

  Most intriguing of all was bai gaprow, or holy basil, which derives its mysterious appellation from its Latin name, ocimum sanctum. Thai restaurant aficionados in the United States are probably familiar with this herb as the predominant flavor in what is fast becoming a ubiquitous classic, chicken with holy basil. Similar in appearance to Italian basil, holy basil is recognizable by its purple stems and green or reddish-purple leaves, which are slightly smaller and thicker than Italian basil leaves. Holy basil is treated by the Thais as a lusty herb, suitable for the robust chili dishes that have not been soothed with coconut milk. In the version of chicken with holy basil that we learned in the school, the fresh leaves were fried first, forming bright green crisps that tasted faintly of artichoke, before being added to the stir-fried chicken mixture.

  Despite the subtle differences among the three basil varieties, fresh Italian basil can be substituted for the other two, and, in fact, it is preferable to the dried holy basil that is sold by some Asian markets and mail-order companies. Fresh holy basil is available sporadically in Thai markets in the United States, particularly in cities with a sizable Thai population such as Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, and Atlanta, and it is well worth the hunt to find it.

  For many farangs, Thai food is synonymous with the incendiary heat of chilies, and one of the most frequent comments about the cuisine is that it’s very hot, if not at times too hot. Chalie is sensitive to this complaint and insists that well-prepared Thai dishes should be balanced, so that the spiciness of hot peppers is offset by the sweetness of coconut milk or palm sugar, the pungency of fresh herbs
, the sourness of lime juice or tamarind, or the saltiness of naam pla. Too often in Thai restaurants in the West that balance is out of whack. In traditional home-style cooking, Chalie explained, the mother spiced the dishes mildly and offered small bowls of hot sauce on the side so that each person could fire up his or her serving to taste. Only when she thought she didn’t have enough food for a meal would the heat be increased to keep the family from eating too much.

  The unusual kapi, fermented shrimp paste, is the central ingredient in a class of foods that represent the very heart of Thai cuisine, the nam phrik, or chili- pepper sauces. The soul of Thai cuisine resides in the repertoire of nam phrik. These are purely Siamese recipes, and some have remained unchanged for many centuries.The ultimate compliment that can be paid to a Thai cook is to praise his or her nam phrik. Recipes for any given type vary so widely from household to household (and from restaurant to restaurant) that standardized quantification of ingredients is impossible, and cooks who have devised celebrated versions often keep the recipe strictly secret.

  —Gault Millau: The Best of Thailand

  We were surprised to learn that the chilies so loved by the Thais are not native to Thailand at all but were introduced to the country by Portuguese missionaries, who brought them from South America in the 17th century. Before that, the only peppers in Thailand were peppercorns, a fact reflected in their name, prig Thai. Peppercorns are still an important spice in Thai cooking, and the Thais are particularly fond of young, or green, peppercorns. In Bangkok markets the fresh green berries are sold still attached to their branches.