You Will Come Home Unable to Make Pad Thai and It Will Be Your Fault
The class teaches you twelve dishes in one day, you reproduce none of them, and three weeks later you are making one of them badly and happily every week.
It is eight in the evening, you have made pad Thai, green curry, tom yum, and four other things in one day, and you can reproduce none of them. The instructor is cheerful about it and says everyone is like this. Then three weeks later you are in your own kitchen making a version of one of them that is not right and is entirely edible, and you understand why she said that.
Last verified 5 September 2026.
What the day is actually like
Most classes in Chiang Mai and Bangkok run a full day, usually something like 9am to 4pm or 5pm, and cost between roughly 800 and 2,000 baht depending on the operator, whether it includes a market tour, and how many dishes you make.
You start in a market. This is the part people skip mentally and the part that teaches the most: you are handed a basket and a list of items and you have to find them, ask for them, and learn what they are. Paprika, galangal, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, dried shrimp, tamarind, fish sauce. By the end of the market you can look at a Thai kitchen and know what nearly everything is.
Then you cook. Generally five to eight dishes, each taught in twenty to forty minutes, in a group that is usually eight to sixteen people with one instructor per three or four students.
You eat everything you made, usually at the end, which is the correct way to run it because it means nobody skips a dish.
The thing that actually matters
Curry paste is the entire skill. Every Thai curry starts with a paste pounded in a mortar: lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime zest, coriander root, cumin, chillies, shrimp paste, fish sauce. Once you can make that paste to taste, every curry on the menu becomes a variation of a thing you can already do.
A blender is not a mortar and this is the single most common mistake people make afterwards. A blender gives you a purée where a mortar gives you a coarse, fibrous paste that has body and keeps its character. Many Thai recipes, including restaurant ones, are specifically designed to be pounded rather than blended.
So the one thing to actually pay attention to in the class is the paste, not the green curry, and the recipe card for the paste is the one to take home.
The other thing that matters
Balance, not heat. A Thai dish is sweet, salty, sour, hot and savoury all at once, and the proportions are what make it taste like Thai food rather than like a foreign recipe that happens to contain lemongrass. Fish sauce is the salt, palm sugar is the sweet, lime and tamarind are the sour.
Which means almost everything in a Thai kitchen is a balancing act with four or five bottles on the counter, and the cook adjusts at the end. Watching somebody taste, decide, and add a half teaspoon of something is a skill in itself, and it is the one that transfers most usefully.
What you should buy before you go home
A proper Thai mortar and pestle. Clay or granite, not a decorative one. This is the single most useful object to carry back and it is cheap.
A small sharp knife if you do not have one, and a vegetable peeler for the kaffir lime, because you cannot zest that skin any other way.
Dried shrimp and shrimp paste in small quantities. These do not travel well and they make an enormous difference when they do.
Good fish sauce, which is cheap in Thailand and expensive everywhere else, and palm sugar rather than white.
How to pick a class
Look at the student-to-instructor ratio, and treat anything above five to one as a demonstration rather than a class.
Ask whether you cook or watch. Plenty of cheap classes are a demonstration followed by a buffet, and that is a completely different product from a class where you do the pounding.
Ask what you are taking home. A written recipe for the curry paste is worth more than a t-shirt.
And take a class where you cook, cook one dish at home that week, and then book a second one. One day teaches you twelve dishes. Two days a month apart teaches you how to actually cook Thai food, because the gap is where the learning happens.
