Morning Thai Cooking Class on a Countryside Organic Farm – 6 Dishes

Twelve kilometres out of Chiang Mai the traffic stops and the fields begin. This half-day class is taught in an open-air kitchen set in the middle of a working organic farm, where the lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime and Thai basil you cook with are growing in beds a few steps from your wok. Classes are capped between four and ten guests, so it never turns into a demonstration you watch from the back.

Pick-up is between 08:30 and 09:00. The first stop is a local fresh market, where the lesson is not just naming ingredients but choosing them: which galangal is young enough, how to spot tired herbs, which of the chillies is heat and which is perfume, what palm sugar and tamarind actually do. At the farm you walk the beds with your instructor and learn the small tricks of picking herbs and vegetables properly before you take your station — your own wok, knife, board and burner, scrupulously clean.

You cook six dishes across the categories, choosing what you want to learn from a long pick-list: rice soup, coconut milk soup or hot-and-sour soup; fried holy basil, cashew chicken or sweet and sour; khao soi, green curry or panaeng; pad thai, papaya salad, sticky rice with mango. Three dishes are set dishes that everyone cooks together, which is how the group learns the same core techniques. You also pound your own curry paste and make a Thai herbal drink — and this is one of very few schools in the country that teaches how to colour rice seven different ways using nothing but plants.

Every dish can be made vegetarian, vegan and/or gluten-free and as mild or as fierce as you like. You eat everything you cook or take it away, a step-by-step recipe e-book follows, and free transfer covers hotels within 4 km of the Old City. Finish is around 14:00.