International Cooking Schools in Thailand
Outside Thailand, the flavors of curry, jasmine rice, coconut milk, tamarind, lemon grass and chilies drive the consumption of a generic Thai cuisine. If you’re a cook, amateur or professional, and passionate about Thai and Asian cuisine, there is no better place to whet your skills than at a cooking school in Thailand.
Although many international cities dish up excellent Thai dishes and restaurants, much of the cuisine is an amalgam of Thailand’s various regions. But when you actually immerse yourself in a specific Thai region then you become acquainted with the real individual and distinctive flavors and ingredients of the dishes.
How to Find a Cooking School in Thailand
You’ll find few real academic culinary experiences in Thailand, but those that do exist are well-known. Most cooking schools are local experiences. Your culinary education in Thailand will include a mash-up of sightseeing, cooking and eating, which is possibly the perfect combination. No chef is really educated until he or she consumes the flavors of the region or locale.
Best yet, if you can get into a school that is taught by a top Thai chef, such as the program in the Oriental Thai Cooking School, then you have the enviable opportunity to observe and learn culinary techniques unavailable anywhere else.
Popular Cooking School Programs in Thailand
The Oriental Thai Cooking School -- By far the most widely acclaimed even enviable culinary arts school in Thailand is that located inside the world-famous Mandarin Oriental Bangkok hotel. Cooking school programs are run on a week-long schedule, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. daily. This offers you the freedom to indulge in Bangkok’s sights, sounds and local flavor. Dishes include: Phanaeng curry beef, pumpkin and coconut milk, crab cakes and crab pastry shells, sweet and spicy soups, syrup-poached sweet potato, pan-fried mackerel and tamarind sauce, to name just a few. Course menus change seasonally. This type of immersion program may be short, but the cooking skills and techniques (paste, frying, stews, soups) you learn may be applied to many other dishes and cuisines where you work as a chef or cook.
SITCA – Samui Institute of Thai Culinary Arts -- Learn Thai cooking on one of the country’s islands, Samui. This intimate school welcomes serious amateur cooks and professional or student chefs. You learn the fundamental Thai ingredients when you help buy them in the local market. Then you learn techniques for preparing, including making chili paste, stews, frying, soups and stir-frying. Professional chef training programs include one- and two-week intensives that promise to teach you critical details of Thai cooking that will change the way you think about and prepare Thai food. Programs can also include classes in Thai vegetable carving.
Baipai Thai Cooking School -- Also located in Bangkok, this intimate school offers a setting quite different from that of the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok Hotel. Again, the program is designed to technically challenge even experienced chefs, but is friendly and down-to-earth enough to engage passionate home cooks. You learn how to cook Thai dishes in an informal home-style kitchen allowing you to imagine how you might incorporate these techniques and ingredients daily. Courses are set up daily.