Cooking over an open fire on a farm in Khao Sok

You can do a Thai cooking class anywhere in this country. There is one on every second street in Chiang Mai, and most of them are a row of gas hobs in an air-conditioned room.

This one is on a farm at the edge of the rainforest, and the cooking starts before anything is lit. You walk the garden, you find out where the ingredients come from, you pull them out of the ground yourself, and then you cook them in bamboo over a fire.

Four hours of picking, chopping, cooking, tasting and finally sitting down to eat everything you made. Thai food, a working farm and the outdoors, which is roughly the opposite of a cooking studio.

It happens at Rungfah Farm Stay, Mr Yoo’s organic farm just outside Khao Sok. You book through Seek Sophie, the platform they sell their spots on.

Straight out of the garden

Before you cook anything, you walk the farm and collect part of what you are about to use.

On the way round you learn what the herbs and vegetables actually are, which is the part that turns out to be useful long after the meal is over. Things you would normally buy in a packet get made here from scratch. Even the coconut milk is pressed fresh from a coconut in front of you.

Then everything you gathered heads for the fire. Garden, bamboo, plate.

Cooking in bamboo

This is the bit that makes it different. Instead of a modern kitchen you work with bamboo and an open flame.

Rice goes in bamboo. Several of the traditional techniques you come across have been used here for generations and involve no equipment you could buy. It is not a photogenic kitchen with a marble worktop, and that is exactly the appeal.

Four Thai dishes

With what you collected you cook four different Thai dishes. Think a curry, pad krapao and tempura, although the exact menu shifts with what is ripe and what the day looks like.

After all the gathering, chopping and cooking comes the honest highlight, which is sitting down with everybody and eating it.

Vegetarian is not a problem, but flag it when you book so they can plan the shopping around you.

More than a cooking class

The dishes are almost a side effect. What you are really getting is a few hours inside how a family here cooks with fresh ingredients and a fire.

Garden herbs, fresh coconut milk, bamboo, flames, and you doing the work the whole way through. It reads far more like a day on somebody’s farm than a class you paid for.

And if you barely cook at home, it does not matter. Nobody expects any experience, and Mr Yoo walks you through it step by step.

The practical bit

• Runs: about four hours, morning or afternoon
• Where: Rungfah Farm Stay, Khao Sok
• Type: shared group activity
• Food: four Thai dishes
• Vegetarian: yes, tell them when you book
• Good for: solo travellers, couples, friends, families

Staying within five kilometres of the farm? They pick you up and drop you back.

You are outdoors for most of it, so bring insect repellent and sunscreen. And do not wear your one nice outfit. Between a garden, bamboo and an open fire, getting a bit dirty is part of the deal.

Why we send people here

Thailand is full of cooking classes and most of them are fine. Rungfah is not a school, it is a small organic farm where you cook with Mr Yoo and his family, and that difference shows up in the first ten minutes.

The part that stuck with us is how personal it stays. You see the farm, you pick your own ingredients, you learn what half of them are, and then you are handed bamboo, fresh coconut milk and a fire. Mr Yoo explains plenty but mostly lets you have a go yourself, so you are not standing there watching somebody else cook.

Good to know: it is a shared activity, so you are cooking alongside other people rather than getting a private lesson, and four hours is genuinely four hours. Come hungry and do not book anything straight after.

If you are in Khao Sok for a few days and want something between the jungle and the lake, this is the afternoon. It goes well next to two days camping in the jungle or a night out on Cheow Lan Lake.

Book the cooking class

Traditional techniques, ingredients you pulled out of the ground yourself, and a meal in the middle of the green.

See and book the cooking class

How do you get the most out of it?

Ask about the herbs you do not recognise. It sounds obvious and almost nobody does it, because everyone is concentrating on their own pan.

The payoff comes afterwards. You walk into the next Thai market and suddenly recognise half of what is on the table, and you read a menu and know what is in a dish instead of guessing from the photo. For the rest of your trip through Thailand that is worth more than the four dishes you made that afternoon.

And turn up hungry. You eat everything you cooked, and it is more food than it looks like while you are making it.