This half day tour provides you with an opportunity to explore the beauty of Laos via its special tastes of food. Joining this tour, you will have hands-on lessons of Lao traditional ingredients in the local market. In addition, you will learn how to cook some typical traditional Lao dishes and understand more about the habits and customs of Lao cuisine.
This cooking class is available at two periods of time: morning class 9.00-13.00 and evening class 15.00-19.00.
At the departure time, you will be greeted and picked up at your hotel’s lobby by an English speaking guide. Then, it’s optional that you can take a car or a tuk-tuk to the local market. Here, you will spend time exploring fresh foods at the market and learn about the ingredients included in your coming cooking lesson. You will be shown around the market to see the local products such as typical kinds of meat and vegetables, dry foods used in daily meals of the locals such as pa daek, a fermented fish sauce. You must be impressed by the fresh ingredients with some intriguing and with unfamiliar flavours.
Leaving the market, you will head to the Mekong riverside for your cooking lesson where you will be taught how to you traditional cooking implements to create a variety of popular Lao dishes.
You will have a drink upon arrival at the kitchen, where you’ll master the art of making perfect sticky rice, or khaoniaow, an important dish in Laos. The cooking teacher will show you how to prepare each dish, including tam makhoung (spicy papaya salad) and ping gai (barbecued chicken), mok pa (fish steamed in banana leaf) and either jeowmaklin or jeowmakkeua (tomato or aubergine dip).
You will complete your hands-on lesson with an authentic dessert: mango or banana with sticky rice, steamed in a banana leaf.
Finishing the lesson, you can buy Lao beer or a nonalcoholic drink and enjoy your lunch under a shady mango tree with a beautiful view to village life along Mekong River Road.