Hoi An and the Eco Cooking Class

22 May Hoi An and the Eco Cooking Class

Posted at 08:23h in Blog, Food, Personal by Mallory 0 Comments

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I had heard so many good things about Hoi An and I was really looking forward to spending a few days here. Unfortunately, it seems every place someone tells me I’m going to love I feel quite the opposite about. *eye roll* Go figure.

Hoi An

We arrived early afternoon on our newly spiffed up, professionally airbrushed, extremely stylish rides (a.k.a. spray paint we applied on the side of the road). We immediately headed towards old town to get our bearings and start looking for a place to stay. David and I had a difficult time agreeing on a place, as he preferred a private room to a dorm, and I preferred something cheap. We checked several places, then finally agreed on one slightly out of town called Hoi An Coco Couple Homestay.

We headed back to town to explore, and were totally overwhelmed. After so many days experiencing full Vietnamese culture and language, with very few tourists, this was like a different world. Suddenly we are now surrounded by tourists, signs and menus in English, aggressive hawkers, overpriced food and drink, and thick crowds.

We stayed until nightfall and watched the town light up with the famed silk lanterns strung from every possible position. It was beautiful, and in the less crowded sections by the river, very romantic. We shared the local dish, cau lau, and our first bia hoi at a restaurant on the river.

I didn’t find the town quite as beautiful as many describe it. It was just too crowded, and all of the ancient buildings had new signs that all looked exactly the same: Block letters painted yellow and carved into the same stained and varnished wood. I’m sure they were trying to avoid trashy or cheap looking signs that may take away from the historic feel of the place, but I think the standardization also takes away from the historic beauty of the buildings. I felt like I was in Duloc in the Shrek movie – a fake doll town.

We got up super early the next morning so I could walk through the market before it got too crowded with other tourists. It was not as entertaining as some local markets I have been through, but much larger and still interesting to people watch. We grabbed some coffee and then headed to the pottery village outside of town. We meandered around and politely watched a few people turning the wheel. They offered to let us try – For free, of course, but then they use that to pressure you into buying something, so we avoided it. It always makes me feel a bit bad, but what use do I have for fragile pottery while traveling?

Fishing and pottery village

We deliberated going to My Son heritage site in the afternoon, but we were tired and lacked motivation. David took a nap while I went back to town to do some more exploring. After that I was fully over Hoi An, and we planned to leave after my cooking class the next day.

Hoi An Eco Cooking Class

I signed up for the Hoi An Eco Cooking Class ($32) based on a blog review I read. They picked me up at the hotel around 8am in two vans full of other ‘classmates’. We separated into two groups when we arrived at a local outdoor market on the outskirts of Hoi An.

Our guide, Mrs. Phi, led us through the narrow aisles between folding tables displaying edible (though some not so appetizing) wares. She described how the locals buy meat very early in the morning before it goes bad, and that anything still up for sale by 9 am is not worth buying. She told us how to tell if shrimp is fresh or has been left out too long, as we watched a woman pick out individual tiny crustaceans from her large basket, removing the undesirable pink-tinged critters. She went over the commonly used herbs, and which are used fresh versus cooked. She also quizzed us on local tropical fruits, and since none of us had tried jackfruit she bought some for us to try during the class.

We piled back in the vans and headed to the location of the course itself. Before we started cooking, though, we were also going to get a ride in the woven basket boats used by local fishermen. We went by ones and twos into the boats, and my guide handed me a cone hat and a bottle of water while simultaneously pushing off with her oar. We glided through a shallow water pathway through half submerged palm trees. A few guides caught the local fresh water purple-clawed crabs and held them up to scare their passengers. It was a short ride out and back, and I wouldn’t have paid for it separately from the cooking course, but it was neat nonetheless.

https://fishwithwings.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/img_7302.mov

Once everyone was back we were introduced to the chefs and their helpers and we sat down to some fresh leaf green tea and a taster plate of local fruit. Once finished, Mr. Kien showed us how husking rice was done in the past and in the present. We tried husking the dried rice grains by tossing them repeatedly on a woven shallow basket, then grinding the cooked grains in an old stone mill that was used to make rice milk. Then they demonstrated how to make real, fresh rice paper over a cooking fire using steam. We each made one sheet of rice paper each, and they took the best of those and cut them so we could use our own rice paper to make spring rolls later. How cool is that??

Making rice paper

(I hate blogging on my phone – I’ll try again to embed this later)

We made several dishes, including spring rolls, sweet fish sauce, banana flower salad, banh xeo, and eggplant aubergine. We had pho as well, but since it is a bone broth we couldn’t make it individually. Mr. Kien demonstrated how to make the broth at the beginning of class and we observed how he put everything together at the end. Once all the dishes were complete we sat down to eat! I ate every single bite. I was both miserably and happily stuffed.

https://fishwithwings.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/img_7373-1.mov

As we lined up to pay our dues and thank the chefs we were also presented with a little cookbook and a multipurpose vegetable shredder that I will treasure when I can get my ass back into a kitchen. Seriously, I can’t wait.

The class was done by early afternoon, and I was dropped back off at my hotel. I was starting to feel a little funny and not so well. I went to bed and tried to sleep, but it wasn’t long before I threw up everything I had eaten that morning. I was miserable and slept the entire rest of the day. I think I can safely say it was probably not the food from the cooking course itself. During our market tour I stupidly took a small bite of coriander. Shit. As soon as I did it, I smacked myself – I was on autopilot and didn’t even think about it. Of course, you can’t trust that anything is washed with clean water or hasn’t been tainted by the raw meat and fish everywhere, so I am pretty certain I did it to myself.

David tried to take care of me and spent a while at a local tailor to have some shirts done. Though I wasn’t 100% the next morning I was ready to get out of town. We had some pho for breakfast to settle my stomach and rode on to the next adventure.