Poo's kitchen: Learning basics of Thai cuisine at a slum school in Bangkok

Ritwik Sharma heads to a Bangkok slum to cook with its celebrity community chef, Saiyuud Diwong aka Poo

It’s 7.40 am and I have arrived at the pickup spot nearly an hour before time to attend a cooking class in Bangkok. I am not an early riser and yet I have undertaken a mini-odyssey that involved getting out of bed, taking a taxi from my hotel to the station and then hopping on to the express train to reach the arterial Sukhumvit Road in downtown Bangkok. All because the opportunity of learning the basics of Thai cooking from a celebrated community chef was too good to pass up.

Five others and I are first given a tour of a wet market by two assistants of Saiyuud Diwong, the chef better known as Poo who runs a cookery school for tourists and residents in Klong Toey, Bangkok’s biggest slum.

With time to kill earlier, I’d had a breakfast of fried eggs, sausage, bacon, fruit and orange juice. Yet, the sights and smells at the sprawling market from where Diwong sources fresh meat, seafood, fruits and vegetables have gradually built a healthy appetite.

After a further ride on the minivan, we are inside the slum area. We walk into a narrow alley that has tidy houses on one side and a rickety row of wooden shelters above a drain on the other, besides the royal portraits and insignia, which are ubiquitous in this country where the lèse majesté law is in place.

Noi, one of our guides, points to the spot by the main door to Poo’s house where she began selling cooked food some 19 years ago. Inside her snug home, Poo, who is wearing an apron over her capri pants and grey T-shirt, welcomes us. We then get started with the first of the three dishes she has picked for the day: som tum, or 

green papaya salad.

We follow her as she grates a papaya halved lengthwise into long threads. On a wooden mortar and pestle, we then crush some garlic and chilli (I discovered an affinity with the Thai yen for upping the heat, while my fellow students who were from Europe and North America preferred to take it easy). To the mix, we add peanuts, green beans, dried prawns and palm sugar, followed by lime juice, fish sauce — a substitute for salt — and quartered tomatoes. After stirring in the grated papaya and carrot, and adding another dash of fish sauce and lime juice, our salad is ready. It is crunchy and has a wholesome, rounded taste.

The combination of varied elements such as hot, sweet and sour or lemony in a single recipe is characteristic of Thai cuisine, enhanced by flavourful and fragrant ingredients such as lemon grass. The second dish, tom yum goong, is a soup, similarly refreshing.

While the recipes take as little time as making Maggi does, Poo is in no hurry. She gestures and tells us how “mushrooms are good for your skin” while chopping a piece or stops to take a whiff of a kaffir lime leaf after splitting it into four before putting it back on the chopping board.

These, along with slices of galangal and fish sauce, go into boiling water. To this, I add fresh prawns and milk. After turning the heat off, I squeeze some lime juice, stir in a generous spoonful of chilli oil that earns my teacher’s approval and garnish it with chopped coriander.

Poo proceeds with her convivial cooking, with more humour and insightful tips, to the last lesson for the main course. She admits she is sick of phad thai. Sick of eating the Thai noodle stir fry, that is. While she can cook it in her sleep, it is a task for us tyros to blend all the ingredients nicely in the pan.

Now I am beginning to regret having had the meaty breakfast earlier, as partaking of the fruits of my labour — a hot plateful of rice noodles, tofu, chicken, scrambled eggs and more — appears a daunting challenge. I savour it slowly and, save for a few strands of noodles, empty the plate.

Poo conducts cooking tours in the UK and Australia, and has been featured in celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube channel on YouTube. She started her school, Cooking with Poo, after rice rates in Thailand were doubled in 2007 and selling food from her home became unviable. Anji Barker, an Australian social worker who was her neighbour and customer, helped her start the cooking class along with some friends.

A neighbourhood fire a few years ago destroyed her school as well as her and her parents’ home, but she rebuilt it. Cooking with Poo today supports small businesses and funds the education of many students in the community.

Before we leave, Poo treats us to a selection of exotic local fruit and a heavenly dessert called cow niaow ma-muang (mango and sticky rice), a deceptively simple looking dish with a silken smooth coconut milk base and a fruity-nutty mix of mango cubes and lentil garnish.

I leave Klong Toey, content with the best Thai food I’ve had — and surprised at the amount I have wolfed down though the clock is yet to strike noon, a time of day usually spent wondering why breakfast is still a thing!

Phad Thai

Ingredients

300 gm diced chicken or fresh prawns

200 gm flat rice noodles

1 tbs sweet radish, diced

1 small red onion, diced

3 spring onions, diced

3 tbs sugar

200 gm tofu, cut into cubes

2 tbs fish sauce

2 eggs

2 tbs white vinegar

3 tbs coconut oil

1/2 cup plain water

2 tbs crushed peanuts

1-2 limes

A handful of fresh bean sprouts

Chilli powder to taste

1 tbs small dried prawns (optional)

Method

Heat oil in wok, fry tofu and red onion and put aside for 2-3 minutes. Add chicken or prawns to onion and tofu mixture, stir fry until cooked. Add noodles, white vinegar, fish sauce, sweet radish, sugar, dried prawns and water and then stir until the noodles are soft. Add more water if necessary. Push the noodles to one side of the wok, and stir fry the egg. Once the egg is cooked, mix it with the noodles. Add bean sprouts and spring onion and mix. Serve immediately with lime slices, crushed peanuts and chilli powder.

Serves 3-4