Back to School: Cooking Class in Luang Prabang
There are a few restaurants in Luang Prabang that offer cooking classes, and I just signed up for the one at Tamnak Lao.
The format is that you start out making Luang Prabang salad (what makes it special is a mayonnaise made with hard-boiled egg yolks), and a stir-fried noodle dish, and then you have both for lunch. Then you see a demonstration of chicken larb, an egg and pork stew, and stir-fried vermicelli noodles. You choose two to make. Then you see a demonstration of a red eggplant curry and an eggplant and pork stir-fry, and choose one to make. Then you eat the three dishes you made as an early dinner.
A couple highlights included the first stir-fried noodle dish, Feu Khua, since it was surprising how the noodles were actually first made into a pancake with egg, then cut up into pieces (amuzing in its semi-redundancy!). The other highlight was trying a totally new fruit, the sapodilla (aka chikoo). Very sweet, with a texture a bit like guava.
But overall, I thought that the class could have been improved in a lot of ways. The biggest one is that the dishes were really toned down for Westerners. For example, we used regular garlic vs. the smaller Thai/Laos garlic, they left out the buffalo skin in the chili paste (jeowbong), and we left out the Paedak (pickled fish) in the Oh Paedak egg and pork stew (the ingredient is even in the name of the dish!). As a result, half of the dishes were very similar to Chinese dishes that I've had or made myself, and the other half were very similar to Thai dishes. Completely the opposite effect of what the class is supposed to impart, that Laos is its own unique cuisine.
The second one is the variety of dishes we prepared. It seemed like lot of the dishes were stir-fried, whereas already in the week I'd been in Laos it's clear that deep frying and steaming are other main ways of preparing food.
Third, our teacher just wasn't very engaging. After the demostration, we went to our stations (shared with one other student so you divide and conquer), and were left to our own devices while the teacher prepared for the next demonstration or cleaned up.
Finally, at $30 this was actually more expensive than the excellent Baan Thai in Chiang Mai, or the class at Tamarind a few blocks away, which based on the reviews I read after the fact (like this write-up in Gourmet), might be better at showing the diversity and uniqueness of Lao food. I certainly can't vouch for it since I didn't experience it, but I'd want to give it a shot if I come back.
