Chef Visoot or Resident Chef

My husband and I thought we'd try a cooking class for 'date night.' We had fun, but the class wasn't as informative as we would have hoped. Chef Visoot was lots of fun and very nice. We liked his love for cooking and his desire to teach. He has a pretty thick accent, but I think everybody in the class was able to follow along. Although he handed out a printed recipe, it didn't contain much information about technique, brands of sauces, or substitutions. He told us about this other information verbally. I scribbled notes as fast as I could about: how to know when the rice noodles are done, how much oil to use, which stores might carry fresh kaffir lime leaves, good preserved radish should be brown-ish not orange-ish, using Asian cabbage instead of bean sprouts, avoiding 'seela' brand sauce, what concentration and type of vinegar should be used (printed recipe calls for "vinegar"), stir the pad thai sauce continuously or it will foam up, etc. At the same time, I was trying to listen to the next sentence as well as participate in chopping and stirring. If more of this information was written on the recipe, I could have listened closer to what he had to say. He wanted the students to choose what ingredients went into the dish and how much of each ingredient. For example, does the class prefer beef or chicken today? How much bell pepper should we add? That's great. BUT, the students don't know / can't know how many peppers to add to make the dish 'medium' spicy or 'mild.' The teacher needs to guide more there. He wanted us to decide. We put only a few peppers in, but the beef & basil dish was too spicy for everybody in the class. The teacher needs to offer advice about quantity of ingredients when the students have no frame of reference to make that choice. We had fun. But this was very pricey. If I wanted the information, I probably could have found it on youTube. As a date, it felt rushed and disorganized.

The event was okay, since the planned chef was out sick, it seemed the replacement chef wasn't quite prepared as we would have liked. By the end of the event, it was nice but it started out rocky.

Fanastic!