If you love Vietnamese cuisine but can’t find it readily in your home country, one of the best activities you can do in Ho Chi Minh City is to sign up for a cooking class!
We were looking for fun things to do in the city in between sightseeing and exploring all the great food haunts when we chanced upon this activity on Klook.
This cooking class is headed by the Saigon Cooking Studio, which is famous in Ho Chi Minh for their traditional recipes that feature contemporary twists. It’s also hosted at (and by) Hoa Túc, a famous contemporary Vietnamese cuisine restaurant!
There’s the option to sign up for the cooking class with a tour of Ben Thanh Market, but we opted instead to just attend the class.
What we cooked at Hoa Túc Cooking Class
The cooking class is organised at a corner of the restaurant itself. If I’m not wrong, we started cooking a little earlier than lunch hours!
From what I understand, the dishes taught may differ based on the day and time of the year that you’re going.
In July 2023, we made three dishes: water fern cake, green papaya salad, and Vietnamese pancake!
As time was rather limited for the cooking class, we would prepare ingredients and cook simultaneously for some of the dishes. This is possible as some of the ingredients tended to overlap and needed time to cook.
The first dish we worked on was the water fern cake (Bánh bèo). It is a thin steamed rice cake that is stuffed with minced shrimp and other ingredients. It actually resembles the chwee kueh that we have in Teochew cuisine!
This involved chopping up shrimps (which you’d realise feature heavily in Vietnamese cuisine) and frying them:
Then we mixed together ingredients like water and flour, poured them into little bowls, and steamed them.
Sprinkle the chopped ingredients on top of the steamed rice cakes, then add a side of fish sauce. And you’re done!
I was pleasantly surprised by how simple and fast this delicious dish was. This is coming from someone with not much cooking talent!
The second dish was the green papaya salad. As it’s a salad, the entire process was quite straightforward.
However, I did find it very difficult at this point to catch up with the cutting and slicing of vegetables. I didn’t have much prior experience doing it and struggled a fair bit with using my knife properly.
Everyone else in the class seemed to have no issue though! The instructor was also kind enough to come over and help me out so that I could keep up. I do feel that it would have been good if they could warn that you need some food preparation experience and/or skills!
I can’t remember exactly what sauces we used, but essentially we tossed everything together to make this delicious appetiser.
The last dish on our agenda for the class was the Vietnamese pancake (Bánh Xèo). It is a savoury fried pancake made from rice flour, water, and turmeric powder. Some people refer to it as a Vietnamese crêpe!
Cooking the Vietnamese pancake is pretty straightforward and doesn’t take very long. The only (arguably) tough part is really holding on to the pan and trying to flip it, because it can be quite heavy!
Similar to eating KBBQ, you can wrap your pancake in raw vegetables for an extra kick of freshness.
Is it worth signing up for Hoa Túc Cooking Class?
Other than my struggle to cut vegetables (oops), I thought the overall class pace was pretty good. Not too fast that you’ll miss out on important steps, but engaging enough so you don’t feel like there’s a lot of empty downtime.
The dishes were also pretty easy to cook and even recreate at home. I appreciated that the staff was fluent in English and very helpful. The class also gave us a physical copy of the recipes so that we can try them out at home!
Considering how enjoyable the class was and how delicious the food turned out, I was very glad that we signed up for this. In fact, I would say this is one of the most memorable parts of my Ho Chi Minh trip!
If you have time to spare and some interest in cooking, I definitely recommend signing up for this cooking class. It costs less than USD 50 per person, which I thought was a pretty fair price for a fantastic cooking class.
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