Cooking In Laos

I got back on the cooking train and took a cooking class on Lao food. It was extremely fun and, not to toot my own horn, but insanely delicious! There were two of us in the class and it began with Chef Somroj taking us on a trip to the local morning market in Luang Prabang to pick up any fresh ingredients we might need.

We made:

• Rice Crepes with a minced pork, carrot, mushroom, shallot and spring onion filling marinated in soy and oyster sauce, sugar and pepper. The rice crepes were steamed for two minutes and then placed on a plate.  The mixture was cooked in vegetable oil and then added to the cooked crepe and finally rolled up like a sushi roll and cut into pieces. These tasty little suckers were served with a soy and sugar dipping sauce topped with crushed peanuts.
• Stuffed Bamboo Shoots with a chicken, mushroom, spring onion, shallot and chili filling. The filling was mixed with crushed rice, corn flour, egg, soy and oyster sauce. Once mixed, it was stuffed into fresh bamboo shoots, which I had created a bunch of tiny slits in using a toothpick. We steamed the shoots for 20 minutes and then fried them in a pan.
• Steamed mushrooms wrapped in a banana leaf. These were steamed for about 20 minutes.
• Dried chili curry with chicken. The dried chilis were muddled with shallots and garlic and then were added to the pan to cook with oil, coconut milk, soy sauce, a little sugar and fish sauce. After the curry was cooked, the chicken (already cooked and shredded) was added to the mixture to marinate.

A few things I learned about Lao cooking. They use a lot of bamboo (2-3 years old) in cooking because it is so abundant (and might I add, tasty!!). Vegetable oil is the main oil in Asian cooking. They typically use dry chili soaked in water. They also don’t cook the meat in the curry but always add already cooked meats.

I invited Danielle & Kendall to join me for lunch and eat some of my food. I’m actually very glad I did because we had a small feast that I could have never finished on my own. The meal was accompanied by steamed and sticky rice. We stuffed ourselves on the  delectable meal! The class was so much fun and Chef Somroj was a delightful teacher. I highly recommend to anyone traveling through Luang Prabang. (if you scroll over the photos it tells you what each picture is of)