I remember watching my mother make sticky rice every morning. She’d be up long before the sun. The roosters crowing along to the sound of lukewarm water running through every hand full of starchy grain.
Washing, rinsing, and repeating as the cloudy water floated away.
Hot steam rises out of the traditional bamboo basket that Christy uses to make sticky rice for an event in San Diego. Sticky rice, also known as glutinous rice, is staple for many people in South East Asia.
Soaking, sitting, steaming.
She’d do this day in, day out. Never skipping a beat, never missing a meal.
Piping hot pillowy balls of goodness. Perfectly salted, perfectly sweet. I never realized how much I craved for something so simple. As I grew older, the annoyance of my mother’s 5am cooking call was a missed memory. I longed for the aroma of freshly steamed rice. Searched the blankets for the warm bamboo baskets she kept it in. Hiding it from my siblings and I, until it was cool enough for consumption.
Once considered a rice for poor people from the countryside, sticky rice now enjoys international acclaim thanks to dishes like mango and sticky rice.
In Thailand’s countryside, Christy examines a photo of her grandparents, who lived in Laos.
The history of this dish originates from my mothers homeland, Laos. Although you can find it in nearly every Thai market, it is one of those Issan dishes that most Lao people eat daily. Oftentimes, multiple times a day. Sticky rice is a long, white fragrant grain almost only discernible by it’s thickness, compared to traditional jasmine rice. You may find it in San Diego’s asian markets labeled ‘sweet rice’ or ‘glutinous rice’. We use it as the vessel to carry other dishes like stews, dipping sauces known as jeow, or to accompany your favorite meat. Unlike Thailand, Laotians eat almost solely with their hands. Sticky rice balls are our utensils, and you scoop your food with the rice, sharing each meal family style.
Historically Lao people ate sticky rice because it sustained them for long days on the farm. Many of them harvesting their own fields of rice as the wet lowlands provided the perfect burial ground for the coveted glutinous rice seeds. My family still harvests rice in their fields in Northern Thailand. As the days begin and end, they always include a warm Thip Khao (a traditional woven bamboo basket) full of the sticky goodness that is affectionately known as khao niew. These are the moments I now long for as an adult; family meals and shared laughter. Learning the history of how we came to be, honoring the land and our ancestors.
Ever wondered why they call it ‘sticky’ rice? This CK student has a clue!
“A single grain of rice can tip the scale. One man may be the difference between victory and defeat.”
– The Emperor in Disney’s Mulan
Take Christy’s cooking class in San Diego, or have an opportunity to taste her food when she cooks at pop up events.
Christy’s Top 5 Tips on How to Make Sticky Rice at Home
Buy the correct rice. Many people don’t know that sticky rice is a species of rice, often referred to as glutinous rice.
If you plan to make it often, consider investing in the bamboo basket to make it the traditional way. Other clever ways include making it in a pressure cooker with options for different types of rice grains.
Don’t wait until you’re hungry to make sticky rice. The process is long. Prepare ahead, washing and soaking your rice the night before you plan to cook it.
A little plastic wrap on the spoon or bowl used for scooping and molding the rice keeps the rice from sticking to it!
Sticky rice is both a dinner staple and a dinner utensil. When the food is ready, this isn’t the time to be posh! Instead use your hands to ball up the sticky rice and dip it into the food you’re eating.
Thai noodle lovers rejoice! We’ve got a brand new cooking class in Bangkok we’re hoping you’ll love.
Are you ready to deepen your knowledge of how to cook Thai food at home?
Are you looking forward to move beyond pad thai, to other delicious noodle dishes?
How about needing a delicious, but vegetarian, vegan, or gluten free Asian dish to wow your friends?
Learn to make your own Thai noodles in our latest Bangkok cooking class.
We’re excited to announce our brand new class to teach you how to make your own Thai rice noodles. This isn’t your average cooking class in Bangkok, where a tour company squeezes as many tourists into the kitchen as possible. Instead we’re aiming to deepen your knowledge of Thai food, and boost your kitchen confidence, by focusing in on one of Thailand’s most beloved ingredients, rice noodles!
You’ll learn to master mixing a rice flour batter for your noodles, and steaming the batter to create the noodles with us. Once your noodles are looking good, we’ll let them cool before cutting them to your preference. We prefer wide noodles that aren’t overly thick, making them perfect for stir frying into a steamy plate of pad see ew.
Guests have their phones ready to share their Thai noodle making experience.
To help you replicate the delicious Thai rice noodles at home, we’ll share our tips for making them with as little hassle and mess afterwards. This includes making a versatile stir fry sauce that you can use with any noodle you make. This is a must do course for Thai food fans who love wok fried noodle dishes like pad see ew!
If you’re not already familiar with pad see ew, this Thai Chinese dish combines wide ‘sen yai’ noodles with soft scrambled egg and Chinese kale. You can find the full recipe for this dish in our mini cookbook (you can download it for free or give a small donation), and when you take our class, our team we will walk you through exactly how to make them. After returning home from your adventures in Thailand, we’re confident you’ll be able to put on a tasting the whole family will enjoy.
Pad see ew noodles are a popular Thai dish but, few have tried it with hand cut noodles!
Unlike egg noodles, Thai rice noodles are gluten free and vegan. This makes it easy to customize your noodle dishes for anyone with special dietary preferences. The mild tasting, slippery texture, also makes these homemade noodles the perfect backdrop for your favorite Thai flavors. You can even mention to our team that you love spice, and we’ll help you make the spicier pad kee mow (drunken noodles), as long as you’re sure you can handle the heat. The versatility of these rice noodles is unmatched!
Alina serves up a plate of spicy drunken noodles, or in Thai, pad kee mow!
We’re pumped to welcome you to Courageous Kitchen for our new noodle class. As with all of our food experiences, proceeds from your participation will help our efforts to reach and teach marginalized youth in Bangkok. So we’re looking forward to sharing a plate of noodles and making a difference with you soon!
Sustainability has becoming a much larger global conversation, and we’ve been thoughtful about how to be more friendly to the environment in our cooking classes, reduce waste, and encourage others to do the same. Bangkok’s International Schools have also been a part of pushing discourse and action to protect the environment, and we’re proud to be in partnership with schools encouraging students to make a difference. Most recently we have been doing workshops and demos in schools to teach youth practical ways they can reduce waste in and around the kitchen.
Thailand is one of the world’s worst plastic polluting countries, creating about 2 million tons of plastic and growing each year. The single-use plastic is especially egregious and has been the focus of many of the awareness campaigns in the past few years. This has been encouraging people to use last plastic, especially plastic bags, straws and other utensils, and even hygiene items such as toothbrushes.
Cooling butterfly pea juice served with a natural morning glory straw in our cooking classes.
When we have an opportunity to do outreach with students, generating discussion is usually our first task. The majority of students we meet in international schools have already seen the viral videos of animals suffering or dead from swallowing too much plastic. In fact some of the current initiatives to influence retailers to use less plastic, have been started by the students themselves. This makes getting students to speak up about how to make changes easy.
Just like the students, we can all acknowledge we need to use less plastic, but can’t always imagine what that may mean. We have to remind students that plastic, as much as it’s a regular part of life today, wasn’t always around. What then, did people do before they were given 3 straws and two plastic bags for every drink purchase they make? We believe that asking these questions can provoke students to realize that many of the solutions they desire may already be in hand.
Using Natural Straws
One fun way to get the discussion going is to make natural straws with the students. To their shock, we grab what seems like an unimportant vase of long stemmed light green plants, and assign them to make their own straws. The plant is morning glory and the students set up cutting, pithing, and cleaning them, while discussing how they’ll use them at lunch later in the day.
Students at St. Andrews International School in Bangkok make banana leaf bowls for salad, and their own morning glory straws.
We find most students know very little about the morning glory plant, whose name in English can be used to refer to a large family of plants. In Thailand however, most discussion revolves around two edible varieties used commonly in Thai cooking. The most famous is referred to as a Chinese breed (pak boong jin or ผักบุ้งจีน), and is flash stir fried with chili and garlic. This version has skinny stems, and if you purchase it, intending to make a natural straw you will be sorely disappointed. Or maybe not, because you can still make a stellar stir fry.
Long stemmed Thai morning glory (ผักบุ้งไทย) is edible, and makes a great natural straw.
The other common variety (pak boong thai or ผักบุ้งไทย) is native to Thailand and grows much larger. Since the stems are mostly hollow on the inside, the plant can float on the water above competing species. However, the strong stems can also make the plant less desirable to eat, so this version doesn’t yet enjoy the culinary popularity of its Chinese counterpart. While tasty, the dishes you would make with this quick growing water vegetable, for example gaeng taepo (แกงเทโพ), are seldom well known by people outside of Thailand. This is because the local variety of morning glory is more likely to be cooked at home than in a restaurant.
Already the students, who are a mix of Thai and expat kids, have learned more about this native ingredient, and especially how to use it to reduce plastic waste. The plant is plentiful in the region and easy to grow. We can imagine the surprise of Thai farmers, if suddenly this ‘water weed’ becomes as valuable as other vegetables. The key is to remind the students that there are some drawbacks to using natural ingredients. The most important issue to be weary, is the ability of the plant to spread disease when not washed or cooked properly.
Cooking Thai food with natural banana leaf table and plate coverings.
Making Banana Leaf Bowls
Thais still recognize the value of the banana leaf. You can find everything from steamed seafood, to sweet snacks being wrapped in banana in strong, sturdy banana leaves for cooking. Chefs who want to give their dish a more natural look, may even use a banana leaf at the bottom of their plate to improve aesthetics. However, the banana leaf has slipped somewhat in importance due to the cheap price and ease of use of plastics and styrofoam. We think the time has come to remind everyone how spectacular these large leaves can be for culinary purposes.
Once you have your hands on some banana leaves, it’s important to know Thai cooks will toast them, before using them with food. This can be done by quickly holding the leaf over fire, or dipping them a few seconds in boiling water. This helps with the hygiene of the leaf, but is also widely down to improve the strength of the leaf, making it tear less easily. Dry and cool the leaves, and they’re ready to be manipulated into all sorts of shapes. Toothpicks can be used to hold them together, but if you’re new to banana leaf origami, you may want to start by simply stapling the leaf to help it hold shape.
A student makes a coconut snack while his friends prepare bowls made from banana leaves.
Cutting the banana leaves into spheres and putting them on plates alone, can help us reduce water usage and how much work needs to be done to wash the dishes. This is really big selling point with teenagers, and we use their sudden enthusiasm to pivot into making a snack together. The snack of choice is Thai crispy cup, filled with a mildly spicy chicken salad (with younger students we will make a Thai coconut pancake with the kids). The students mix their salad to their liking, some adding more fish sauce and palm sugar than recipe really requires. We don’t scold them much, we’re thankful they’re walking away excited about their banana leaf bowls, morning glory straws, and the tasty snack they learned to make.
This snack is pronounced kra-tong-tong (กระทงทอง) and is a crispy edible cup we can fill with a variety of ingredients.
We all have a role to play in caring for the environment and caring for people in need. Sharing this mission with kids, whether in slums or Bangkok’s fancy international schools, has been rewarding for our Courageous Kitchen team. To take our commitment to the next level this year, we’re on path to become Bangkok’s first plastic free cooking class, and hope to more cooking demos with students around the city.
Thank you for your support, and hold on to your aprons, we’ve got more to say about sustainability and making a difference in Thailand. If you have other tips for being sustainable in the kitchen please leave a comment below!
Anyone who’s set foot in South East Asia the past few weeks has learned the hard way, just how hot this part of the world gets this time of year. Whether ducking into well air conditioned mega malls, or seeking refuge in one of Bangkok’s innumerable 7-Eleven shops, everyone has a strategy or two for heat relief. In today’s shared plate we want to make sure you’re on the lookout for one dessert that has been helping keep both chili scorched tongues, and sweat soaked bodies cool, long before the arrival of ice cream.
A Courageous Kitchen student excited for his chance to cook a traditional Thai dessert.
As a planet we’re experiencing unusually hot temperatures this year. Fortunately Thais have been coming up with inventive ways to deal with intense heat for ages. Long before refrigeration was democratized and ice cream was everywhere, shaved ice ruled hearts and minds in the Kingdom of Thailand with few challengers. When the air gets heavy and the heat seems unbearable, this is the dessert Thais seek out in Bangkok’s food filled streets.
Among street markets in Bangkok, a vendor serving shaved ice may feature anywhere from ten to thirty ingredients for guests to choose from. The variety of ingredients on display is your first clue that shaved ice desserts (called nam kaeng sai in Thai or น้ำแข็งใส) isn’t a singular dessert, but an entire experience. When you arrive at such a shop, you typically choose a few ingredients, and whether you’d prefer to have them served in pandan syrup or sweetened coconut milk. The ingredients usually include fresh fruit, candied fruit, jellies, rice noodles, and an odd selection of beans, peas, sweet corn, and millet. You can throw a mix of them all into your custom made bowl, or you can have a pre-set mix using ingredients popular enough to stand alone.
Students quickly prepping their water chestnuts and tossing them around like pros.
All of the ‘rubies’ are colored naturally with beetroot for red, butterfly pea flower for blue, and pandan leaf to give you a natural green glow.
Tup tim grob (ทับทิมกรอบ), translated directly as red rubies, is one of those ingredients popular enough to stand on its own. In street side stalls, this bright pink colored water chestnut is often one of the first sell out. The snack is made by taking water chestnuts, covering them in flour (most commonly tapioca or arrowroot starch) and boiling them. Their bright pink color is borrowed typically from an artificially colored red syrup, and the boiled flour layer gives the chestnuts a soft, shiny sheen resembling a hand full of jewels.
The most recent guest to be won over by tup tim krob was the EU Ambassador to Thailand, Pirkka Tapiola. On a very hot day Ambassador Tapiola arrived with his staff and family in tow, for a fun day of visiting the market and cooking with our Courageous Kitchen students.
We also taught the ambassador and friends to make fried spring rolls, pad see ew (if you saw our last shared plate post, you know we’re huge fans of these Thai noodles), but the crowd pleaser was hands down the multicolored and multi-textured tup tim krob. We prefer to make the dessert with natural coloring, using beetroot, butterfly pea, and pandan to make several eye catching colors. Then for good measure guests could add fresh cantaloupe, watermelon, and lemon basil seeds. The lemon basil seeds are particularly interesting, because they’re eye catching and when soaked, develop a texture similar to chia.
Ambassador Tapiola empties his wok full of steamy pad see ew noodles.
Ambassador Tapiola and his wife work with students on coating the water chestnuts with flour.
Nowadays there’d no doubt that ice cream shops are the heat stroke prevention centers of choice for many dessert lovers. Still, however, the allure of this simple sweet remains in Thailand, and should be sought out while you’re visiting. With fewer shops remaining in business, you may find it packed with locals clamoring for a bowl nostalgia that the red gems bring.
This bowl of tuptim krob is ready to enjoy on a hot day!
Happy snacking, and don’t forget to share this bowl of gems with someone new!
If you’re interested in more edible relief from the summer heat, leave us some feedback below and stay tuned. For those travelers and foodies passing through, we look forward to making this Thai dessert with you in our cooking class in Bangkok.
Special Thanks to the EU Embassy, and all of their staff for making a special visit to Courageous Kitchen!
Courageous Kitchen typically provides weekly English and cooking class to students from marginalized communities. This is important work and partially funded by our efforts to host cooking classes and street food tours for tourists visiting Bangkok. However, a few times a year we invite the youth we serve to take part in a multi day cooking camp. We recently hosted the first camp for this year and invite you to watch the following slideshow from the event:
During the camp we have more time to review and drill the English vocabulary the students are usually learning in Saturday classes. Since the kids are usually cooking every meal, they have extra time to develop in the kitchen as well. During the camps we invite teachers from outside the charity to help us expand what we can offer students including specialized cooking, art, drama, and music activities.
We believe all of the classes work well in tandem with our English teaching curricula, by giving the students plenty of opportunity to practice their English in the kitchen, and during other fun activities. The biggest challenge is that the students all come from a variety of backgrounds. Some have participated in our classes since they were very young, with our pre-school teaching being their first organized classroom experience. Others may still be new to our classes, and have only rudimentary knowledge of English. Each camp is special because with more time to spend with the students, we can more easily identify where a student may be excelling, or needing more encouragement and assistance.
Pairing the camp activities with our English curricula, gives the children a chance to use the language skills they have learned.
If you’ve visited us before, you know our specialty is teaching and cooking Thai cuisine. However, in the slideshow from the most recent camp we were able to offer a variety of dishes, thanks to our volunteer chefs, teaching the kids to make Vietnamese cuisine, and western dishes such as hamburgers and pizza. Since the majority of our students don’t usually have an opportunity to eat in restaurants, they cherish the chance to try new dishes and learn about how people in different cultures eat in other parts of the world.
Special thanks to everyone who made our cooking camp in Bangkok a great success.
We are so grateful to everyone involved, especially visiting teachers who braved through Thailand’s summer weather, and all of our sponsors. If you’re interested in to sponsor a future camp, just leave a note when you donate online that the funds are for our cooking camp. As a small organization with no institutional funding, your support is so important to us!
