Food is prominent way to learn about culture hence, I usually crave for a cooking class in new countries. We decided to take a cooking class in Hoi An as we primarily liked the food preparation more down south and central of Vietnam. Our Homestay owner Spring had a nice set up for the cooking class with a working kitchen and stove located below the tree house we had rented. Since this was a dedicated class, I was able to ask my heart out with questions related to Vietnamese cooking.
Vietnam blog articles to checkout for your planning
But I have had terrible experience in past when we barely did research or went along with most recommended cooking class. In both cases, the cooking class tended to be a not so good experience for different reasons. In case of randomly choosing a cooking class which we had Turkey, the homestay owner’s mother gave a class wherein she used many canned items, bullion cubes for stock, mixed masalas with no details given to us, and to top it she barely spoke English. In same incident we had prepared a sweet dish with ready to cook deep fry dough balls that we took out of the packet and just dunk in sugar syrup. Where is the learning? In case of highly recommended, these places usually have large groups in these classes, tight menu, and at times lacks personal touch. What is the point of learning recipes which you may actually not like so much.
So this time we carefully did lot of research on most recommended places and before booking a class when we are already in the city, we took a quick peak at the place. The most recommended cooking class in Hoi An are in the market such as Vy’s restaurant (charges USD 32). In real these are bunch of cooking class literally separated by walls and all of them have almost exact same menu and pricing. While such a setup may work for some, but I didn’t find it exciting at all. So I decided to explore. During my deeper interaction with the homestay lady, Spring, I felt a bit more connected. And since she would take an exclusive class, I felt there was room for some actual learning.
The cooking class we took was in 3 parts: shopping the ingredients, cooking, and eating.
Number of recipes : Pho, fresh spring rolls, deep friend spring rolls, rice pancakes, and the red chilli sauce.
Cost : USD 35 per person
Cooking class duration: 5 hours
When a cooking class includes ingredient shopping, naturally the class is ideal to start in morning. To begin our class, Spring took us to a local vegetable market, where she gave us a quick tour of the market and we went to the famous stalls to buy fresh local ingredients. Upon arrival, Spring and her husband got cleaned up ingredients to the cooking kitchen which meant we helped them in chopping. The cooking class lasted about 5 hrs in total with a breakup of 1 hr in shopping (I took lots of photos), 3 hours for cooking and 1 hour for eating and chatting. While 5 hours may seem long time, it was more like spending 5 hours with a Vietnamese family exchanging culture notes and knowing them on personally level a bit. We absolutely loved it.
Spring was patient to answer so many of my queries and I had tons of them. Since we missed out making the chillie sauce, she sweetly send me the recipe over the whats app and has answered my recipe query after 1 month when I was making the food back at home again.
If you are on a tight schedule, then you may skip the shopping part and keep the menu limited to 3 items to ensure you finish the entire class in maybe 3 hours. We loved everything that we cooked but my favorite was the vegan Pho.
Here is a visual tour of our experience:
2HappySouls 