Jungle cooking Course - Chiang Mai Thailand

Chiang Mai Sightseeing

Jungle cooking Course, start our mild outing day, no major predators or hunting for fresh meats. We'll take you to the Thanin Market, known for selling fresh ingredients from jungle everyday such as taro, sweet potato, various wild mushrooms, herbs and vegetables. After purchased a number of ingredients, it is time to go to the jungle. It is actually at the background of a cookery school. Neatly sectioned off by bamboo walls and announced by a sign in red stylish letters spelling out the words The Jungle, it is a small grassy area shaded by trees.

This mock up jungle is an unusual hybrid of the natural and the artificial. Even though the bamboo walls are clearly man made. The table and benches combining to be dining area made of simple wooden planks. The cooking fire is authentic. No fancy barbecue grills, just an open pit with a bamboo rack on which to lean cooking utensils.

First on the schedule was learning how to find the drinking water. The fact that rivers run through jungle, but the advantage to get water out of trees is that it is guaranteed to be free of bacteria, dirt and bugs. Two excellent sources of water are banana trees and bamboo. As both have hollow spaces in their trunks, they can absorb rainwater. We'll demonstrate how to tap on different sections of a bamboo trunk to discern which one is empty and which one is filled with water. Then the water can be collected from the appropriate section.

The next task was to chop the trunk into smaller cylinders to use for cooking rice. Recommend using heavy-duty knife and struck the blade against the bamboo, turning the trunk at intervals. You'll deftly cut off a section in no time. Full the bamboo with rice and water, then roll up sections of banana leaf to plug the cylinders and lean them against the bamboo rack in the cooking pit. On the usual campfire's menu roasted corn wrap in banana leaves (to prevent it from burning then bury under the ashes in the pit) and sweet potatoes goes as is. They will be the first to be ready. The next dish is fried eggs on banana leaves. This requires a folding banana leaf into a small rectangle container holding with toothpicks, which made from bamboo. Crack open an egg into it, find a flat part of rock, ash or the wire mesh grill in the pit to put it on, and your breakfast is on the way.